Amarinder Singh to contest Punjab polls from Patiala

"I will contest from Patiala. Patiala is with us for 400 years and I am not going to leave it due to Sidhu," Captain Singh said on his official Facebook page, according to NDTV.

Singh has won the Patiala assembly constituency four times and his wife Preneet Kaur represented it for three years from 2014 to 2017. His father Maharaja Sir Yadavinder Singh was the last Maharaja of the princely state of Patiala.

The former Congress veteran announced his own political party called Punjab Lok Congress earlier this month and said it'll contest all 117 assembly seats in the state, declaring an open challenge to the Congress leadership.

Singh stepped down as the chief minister after months of bitter feud with Punjab Congress president Navjot Singh Sidhu that snowballed into a full-fledged crisis in the state unit of the party.

Singh's unceremonious exit as state chief minister was also the result of Gandhi's siding with Sidhu, who was also Congress's star campaigner in the last Punjab assembly polls.

As the series of attacks and counterattacks continued, Sidhu managed to project himself as the one fighting for "Punjab's conscience" as he kept on demanding action on his list of demands.

While Singh warned him of an election defeat worst than that of BJP's General (retd) JJ Singh, who contested the 2017 election but finished with over 60,000 votes behind him, Sidhu scored another point over Singh saying that an Assembly seat was not worth (discussing) as the concerns of the people of Punjab were all that mattered to him.