Chandigarh: Punjab chief minister captain Amarinder Singh on Saturday (July 20) accepted Navjot Singh Sidhu's resignation from the Cabinet, an official statement said.

He further said Sidhu's resignation had been forwarded to Punjab Governor VP Singh Badnore. 

The acceptance of the resignation came days after Sidhu resigned from the Punjab Cabinet.

Singh, who was in Delhi earlier this week, had said on Tuesday (July 16) that he would decide on Sidhu's resignation after going through the contents of the letter once he reaches Chandigarh.

The chief minister returned to Chandigarh on Wednesday (July 17) evening.

Sidhu, who had been at loggerheads with the chief minister and was stripped of key portfolios in a Cabinet reshuffle on June 6, took to Twitter on Sunday (July 14), making public his June 10 resignation letter from the state Cabinet addressed to the then Congress president, Rahul Gandhi.

Earlier this week, Amarinder had said if the cricketer-turned-politician did not want to do his job, there was nothing he could do about it.

However, Sidhu claimed that he had sent his resignation to the chief minister on July 15.

On June 6, chief minister Amarinder Singh had divested Sidhu of the local government and tourism and cultural affairs departments and allotted him the power and new and renewable energy portfolio.

Ever since the portfolio reshuffle exercise, Sidhu and his wife Navjot Kaur have been maintaining a distance from the media.

The tension between Singh and his Cabinet colleague had come out in the open last month when the chief minister blamed Sidhu for the "inept handling" of the local government department.  The chief minister also claimed that it resulted in "poor performance" of the Congress in urban areas in the Lok Sabha polls.

The cricketer-turned-politician however, had said that his department was being "singled out publicly" while asserting that he could not be taken for granted as he had been a "performer throughout".