U’khand Assembly session Day 2: BJP, Cong spar over Gairsain issue
The Congress MLA said, “Despite the then chief minister,Trivendra Singh Rawat, declaring Gairsain in Chamoli district (about 260 km away from Dehradun) as the summer capital of Uttarakhand, on March 4, 2020, the state government has not functioned from there for a single day”.
Congress MLA Pritam Singh and state parliamentary affairs minister Premchand Aggarwal engaged in a war of words on Wednesday during the second day of the winter session in Uttarakhand assembly over “government not functioning from Gairsain”, the summer capital of the state.
The Congress MLA said, “Despite the then chief minister,Trivendra Singh Rawat, declaring Gairsain in Chamoli district (about 260 km away from Dehradun) as the summer capital of Uttarakhand, on March 4, 2020, the state government has not functioned from there for a single day”.
Singh said even after announcing that the budget session will be held at Gairsain earlier this year, the same was not done, with the government saying it will “affect the Char Dham yatra”.
“Till now the state government has only hoisted the national tricolour in Gairsain on Independence Day, Republic Day, and state foundation day. But not a single day has the government functioned from Gairsain during the summer months”, he said
Responding to Singh’s allegation, Aggarwal said “... it is the Bharatiya Janata Party government that has always cared for Uttarakhand and its people”. He spoke about how “Atal Bihari Vajpayee helped in the creation of the separate state of Uttarakhand” and how “Prime Minister Narendra Modi was now helping in improving and developing the state”.
At this point, Pritam Singh and many other Congress MLAs rose from their seats and objected to Aggarwal’s statement. Singh said, “It was the struggle of the common man and statehood revolutionaries and their sacrifices that contributed to the formation of the separate state of Uttarakhand in 2000”.
Aggarwal said when the announcement was made, he had expressed his gratitude to the then chief minister but yje Congress MLAs event had not even participated in the celebrations in Gairsain that day.
Following the ruckus on the issue, speaker Ritu Khanduri rose from her seat and told both the ruling party and Opposition legislators not to speak directly to each other and instead address her on the issues they want to respond to. She also asked them to maintain the decorum of the House.
Aggarwal then announced that the next session of the state assembly will be held in Gairsain.
Gairsain as the state’s capital has been a hot political issue between both the present ruling BJP and the Congress for long now. Even during the movement of statehood for Uttarakhand also, people had demanded Gairsain as the state capital claiming it is located in the hills and is convenient to access for people from both Garhwal and Kumaon divisions. Even last year Opposition Congress had lashed out at the state government for “ignoring” Gairsain and holding the winter session of the legislative assembly in December in Dehradun.
Gairsain has been a focal point of the separate Uttarakhand movement and in the minds of statehood agitators ever since the separate statehood movement began in the 80 and 90s. They argue that Gairsain being almost equidistant from both Kumaon and Garhwal divisions, it is better that the state has a permanent hill capital on the lines of Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland and Sikkim
In the evening, Yashpal Arya and other Congress MLAs including Pritam Singh and Bhuwan Kapri spoke about unemployment issues and how the “recruitment scams in the state have dented the image of the state” and created a “trust deficit between the youth and the state government”.
Singh said, “Why has the state government been running away from the Congress’s demand for a CBI probe in the recruitment scams and the receptionist murder case”.
When Singh started speaking about irregularities in the recruitment of staff in the state assembly, speaker Khanduri said he cannot talk about this issue related to the assembly in the assembly. Singh said given the speaker’s instructions, he will not speak about it.