Chandigarh: Expressing concern over the law and order situation in Punjab, former chief minister Parkash Singh Badal said today that the state was fast slipping towards complete and dangerous anarchy.

Badal's comments come a day after a Hindu outfit leader was shot dead in Amritsar while the husband of an Akali sarpanch was gunned down in Malerkotla in Sangrur district.

In less than nine months, the Congress has ruined the hard-earned atmosphere of peace and communal harmony in the state, he said in a statement here.

It is jungle raj here with anti-social elements free to take law into their own hands, he added. Political assassinations and communal murders in Punjab are pushing the state towards the edge of a dangerous precipice, he said. "Punjab is fast slipping towards complete and dangerous anarchy," he said.

The former chief minister said that maintenance of peace and preserving communal harmony require a combination of political will and administrative determination. Both are conspicuous by their absence in Punjab today, he said.

Badal appealed to the people of Punjab to maintain peace at all costs and not to allow the age-old bonds between brotherly communities to be disturbed. The reason for this drastic deterioration in the situation was that "peace and communal harmony do not even figure among the priorities of the government," he claimed.

"This has resulted in a complete collapse of administration with peace and communal harmony being the worst casualties," he said. Badal condemned the assassination of Vipan Sharma, a Hindu leader in Amritsar yesterday.

"During my tenure as chief minister, I began and ended every day in office by keeping a close watch on threats to peace and communal harmony and reaffirming my government s commitment to these sacred ideals," Badal said.

But in the last nine months, I have not heard of a single occasion when the political leadership and the top civil and police administration in the state got together to review the situation in this regard, he added.