Amarinder SIngh said all 58 cases flagged by the centre were investigated and allegations of forced labour and drug abuse were found to be a “bundle of lies”.

Days after the central government issued a clarification over its memo to the Punjab government about instances of people being given drugs and forced to work as labourers, Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Sunday slammed the centre for spreading “misinformation” about the state’s farmers.

He said it was “yet another conspiracy to defame Punjab’s farmers”, whom the central government and the BJP have been “persistently trying to malign by dubbing them as terrorists, urban Naxals and goons” to derail their agitation against the new central farm laws.

The Chief Minister was reacting to the letter sent by the Ministry of Home Affairs to the Punjab government about 58 “bonded labourers” rescued in the northern state.

Calling the letter a “bundle of lies”, Captain Singh slammed the centre over its “unwarranted charges” of farmers using people as bonded labourers in Punjab.

“An analysis of the whole episode reveals that highly sensitive information pertaining to national security regarding the arrest of some suspicious persons, apprehended by the Border Security Force (BSF) from close to the volatile Indo-Pak border, has been unscrupulously twisted on baseless conjectures to malign and tarnish the farmer community,” Captain Singh said in a statement.

“This reality has been further substantiated by the fact that a selective leakage of the contents of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) letter to some leading newspapers and media houses have been done without waiting for an appropriate response from the state government,” he said.