Hamirpur MP Anurag Thakur campaigned for BJP candidate Hoshiyar Singh in the Dehra constituency of Kangra district today. However, many of his supporters in the constituency maintained distance from Hoshiyar Singh, with whom they had bitter relations.
Anurag said Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu was looking for a new political pasture in Dehra as the people of his own constituency Nadaun had rejected him. The Chief Minister could not get a lead for the Congress in Nadaun in the recent Lok Sabha elections, he added.
The former Union Minister said that the Chief Minister and his wife were now calling Dehra as their native place. However, ironically, the roads to the Chief Minister’s paternal village and his wife’s native village were still kutcha, he added. “In the 18-month tenure of the Congress government, neither the Chief Minister nor his wife had spared a thought to get the roads to their paternal villages metalled,” he alleged.
Anurag said that the only achievement of the Congress government was that it had closed around 900 institutions opened in the state by the previous BJP government. Besides, this government had burdened the state with additional loans of about Rs 25,000 crore, he added. “The Congress government has taken Rs 25,000 crore additional loans and pushed Himachal into a debt trap. The government has been cribbing about the rising debt burden but has liberally allotted Cabinet ranks to friends,” he alleged.
He said that the Centre had sanctioned development projects for Dehra, including the Central University of Himachal Pradesh (CUHP) campus. He alleged that the work on the campus of the CUHP at Jadrangal in Dharamsala was getting delayed as the state government was not depositing money for the transfer of forestland in the name of the CUHP.
Asked about the absence of former minister Ramesh Dhawala from the campaign for the Dehra byelection, Anurag said that Hoshiyar Singh met him today and differences between the two leaders would be ironed out.
About the Enforcement Directorate raids on stone crushers in Hamirpur, he said that investigating agencies were doing their job and he would not comment on it.
