Planning a grand show and yearlong celebrations for Haryana’s golden jubilee (swarna jayanti) year, the Manohar lal Khattar-led State Government on Tuesday failed to bring together prominent members of the State level swarna jayanti celebrations committee during its first meeting.
While prominent leaders from Opposition gave a miss to the meeting, all Union Ministers and BJP MPs from the State also failed to turn up at the meeting to chalk out a strategy for the golden jubilee celebrations of the State.
Many prominent Bollywood personalities, sportspersons, industry honchos, ex-servicemen among others, who were made the members of jumbo 141-member committee also did not turn up for the meeting.
leader of opposition and INlD’s senior leader Abhay Singh Chautala, former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, state Congress chief Ashok Tanwar, ClP leader Kiran Choudhry stayed away from the meeting while BJP MPs from Haryana, Raj Kumar Saini, Ashwani Kumar Chopra also gave a miss to it.
All in all, the meeting remained a government’s affair with only few outsiders turning up for the meeting, apart from Chief Minister, state Cabinet Ministers, other BJP MlAs, 2 MPs and senior bureaucrats.
Among prominent people who attended the meeting included olympics medalist Sakshi Malik, Bollywood director Satish Kaushik, magician Shankar Samrat, former lt. Governor Chandrawati, ‘Hasya Kavi’ Surender Sharma, mountaineer Santosh Yadav.
The 141 members committee was formed on September 19 by the BJP led Haryana Government to invite suggestions to celebrate 50 years of formation of Haryana from November 1, 2016 to October 31, 2017.
A senior official of the State Government said that invitations for the meeting were sent to all the committee members but many could not make it to the meeting due to their prior engagements.
On the other hand, INlD state president Ashok Arora alleged that the BJP led Centre and Haryana Government is not serious about the swarna jayanti celebrations of the state. Not even a single Union Minister turned up for the meeting, said Arora.
The INlD leader also alleged that opposition leaders did not attend the meeting as they got their invitation for the meeting only a day before.
leader of opposition Abhay Chautala and Congress leaders have also said that they did not attend the meeting as they received the invitation very late.
The State Government had included Union External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Union Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu and other Union Ministers namely Birender Singh, Rao Inderjeet Singh, Piyush Goyal, Krishan Pal Gujjar, Vijay Goel, General VK Singh and former Prime Minister of Fiji, Mahendra Chaudhry as committee’s members.
Apart from this, Haryana’s ambassador for yoga and ayurveda, Baba Ramdev, actors Parineeti Chopra, Om Puri, Randeep Hooda, Subhash Ghai, Satish Kaushik and former cricketers Kapil Dev, Chetan Sharma, Virender Sehwag were also made the members of the committee.
Haryana would enter its golden jubilee year on November 1. Haryana state was formed on 1 November 1966. The state was carved out of the former state of East Punjab on a linguistic basis.
Recently, the Chief Minister had unveiled the logo of state’s golden jubilee celebrations.