Farmers Movement Archive

BJP postpones Dhankar’s meeting in Yamunanagar

Just hours before BJP state chief OP Dhankar’s scheduled visit to Yamunanagar, the party on Saturday night announced that the meeting had been postponed citing ‘personal reasons’ and the leader’s ‘busy schedule due to assembly session’.A message circulated by the party’s district media coordinator Kapil Garg said the meeting had been rescheduled for March 17, when the assembly session ends. Dhankar, a former agriculture minister and MLA from Jhajjar’s Badli constituency had, however, failed to get re-elected in the 2019 assembly polls. District party chief Rajesh Sapra said, “The program was postponed due to his urgency for some other meetings. He was scheduled to attend several cadre meetings here that could have taken a full day and he had urged us to reschedule it after two weeks.”Dhankar was scheduled to address district executive, core group and other meetings for the first time around noon since he took over as the state president last year.After the announcement, BKU (Charuni) district chief Sanju Gudiana, who had chaired meetings in several villages inviting residents to join the protest, said, “The district administration officials had called us earlier in the day to convince us to limit the protest to one spot but we refused. On Friday, they had urged us to skip the agitation but we were adamant to act on the Samyukt Kisan Morcha’s call to ban his entry.”On Friday, former chief minister and leader of the opposition Bhupinder Singh Hooda had said, “There is a need to move a no confidence motion against the BJP-JJP government as it has completely lost public confidence and the coalition is betraying public opinion and taking anti-people decisions one after the other. This is why the public no longer has any faith in the government. The situation has become such that the chief ministers, ministers and MLAs are scared to go out in public.”The Yamunanagar police had made elaborate arrangements to counter the ire of the farmer unions that have already announced a ‘repeat of Kaimla’, where CM Manohar Lal’s helicopter was not allowed to land in a Karnal village for a pro-farm-law rally in January.In a statement issued earlier in the day, superintendent of police Kamaldeep Goyal said tight security arrangements had been made and blockades had been setup at different places in the district. On the series of meetings and arrangements made ahead of Dhankar’s meeting, DC Mukul Kumar remained incommunicado, while Sapra said, “The administration had to make their own arrangements to maintain law and order. As far as the meeting at the party office is concerned, we were also fully prepared.”Earlier in the day, the party’s state general secretary Vedpal, an advocate, also had to addressed a press conference, urging unions to skip the protest as it was a party meeting, not a government event. Vedpal also blamed the opposition for doing politics in name of the agitation and invited them to a political contest before the voters.“The unions are scared of us, as our party has been telling the real truth about the farm laws to the people. Using the brotherhood of the society to hide the truth is wrong,” he said.

Hindustan Times

07-03-2021

Dehradun