New Delhi:
In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, Congress president Rahul Gandhi will visit Uttarakhand on April 6 and address three public meetings. Some sources also said that Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi could also attend the rallies in Almora, Pauri and Haldwani.
Former prime minister Manmohan Singh may visit the Terai region on April 8 or April 9 and hold a public meeting at Pant Nagar, Rudrapur or Bajpur. Former chief minister of the hills state Harish Rawat has been tasked with planning the schedule for both Rahul Gandhi and Manmohan Singh.
This would be the Congress president’s second leg of touring Uttarakhand ahead of the Assembly elections. On March 16, Rahul Gandhi has blown the poll bugle with a rally in Dehradun, where senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Bhuwan Chandra Khanduri’s son Manish Khanduri had joined the Congress.
Meanwhile, in his address, the Congress president had taken on the BJP-led government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and accused him of posing for cameras at the Corbett National Park in the state last month hours after Central Reserve Police Force personnel were killed in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir by the Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist group, PTI reported.
“Immediately after the Pulwama attack, in which 40 CRPF jawans were killed, the Congress had said it was with the government and the country. I had cancelled all my programmes,” Gandhi said. “Everyone knows what Narendra Modi was doing when our jawans were being killed. He was posing for the cameras to shoot for a National Geographic documentary.”
After the event, the Congress president visited the homes of CRPF officer Mohan Lal Raturi, who lost his life in the Pulwama attack, and Major Chitresh Singh Bisht, who was killed on February 16 while defusing an improvised explosive device in Kashmir’s Rajouri district. He also visited Major Vibhuti Shankar Dhoundiyal’s home in Dehradun, who had died in an encounter with terrorists in Pulwama a few days after the attack on a CRPF convoy there.
