Ridiculing the Chief Minister Harish Rawat on his sit-in in Delhi on Thursday, protesting against the Centre rejecting the Bhagirathi Eco Sensitive Zone master plan, the Bharatiya Janata Party State president Ajay Bhatt said that despite his earlier resolve to resort to day-long fast, the CM had strangely chosen to stage a mere sit-in for a couple of hours. “It exposes how serious the State Government is on the matter. The sit-in was staged to fool the people and hide the fact that the then UPA government at the Centre and the State Government are to blame for things having come to such a pass,” he said this while talking to the media on Friday.
Dubbing the memorandum CM had submitted to the Prime Minister through the officials as a bunch of lies, Bhatt said it was meant to hoodwink the people into believing that the Centre was blocking development in the name of ESZ. “But such a malicious ploy would not succeed,” the BJP state chief said, adding that he was choosing Delhi to unfurl his gimmicks after model code of conduct was enforced in Uttarakhand.
Dwelling on the memorandum addressed to the Prime Minister, Bhatt said that nine points figured in it, including ESZ. “When he seemed so serious about ESZ why has he not laid his focus exclusively on itIJ It means that he has not done proper home work,” he said.
“One can hardly forget the fact that the UPA government was responsible for the whole thing when Rawat was a member of that government. Besides, the Congress- led state government did not care to make a proper assessment of the Bhagirathi ESZ and instead chose to send a proposal to the Centre. Hence the rejection by the Centre.
Meanwhile, the Union water resource ministry asked the department concerned to send a revised proposal to them. The letter written by the state PCC chief Kishore Upadhyay to PM was the same, sound and fury, sans anything substantial in it, Bhatt added.