Airport renaming: Govt wipes dust off SP proposal

An old proposal of the Samajwadi Party (SP) government on renaming Lucknow airport will be discussed in the Union Cabinet’s meeting slated for Thursday. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jul 17, 2008, 02:23:50 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Within days of supporting the UPA government over the nuclear deal, an old proposal of the Samajwadi Party (SP) government on renaming Lucknow airport will be discussed in the Union Cabinet’s meeting slated for Thursday.

Four years ago the Mulayam Singh Yadav government had submitted a proposal to the Civil Aviation ministry to rename Lucknow’s Amausi airport after the name of former Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh.

Singh is father of RLD president Ajit Singh, who has three MPs in Parliament. Singh was part of the Mulayam Singh government in Uttar Pradesh, when the proposal was mooted and now his support is crucial for the UPA government to survive the trust vote in the Lok Sabha on July 21 and 22.

The Cabinet is considering the proposal at the time when Ajit Singh has not come out openly in support of the government on the nuclear deal issue. Incidentally, Chaudhary Charan Singh became prime minister with the support of Congress in July 1979, which withdrew support to him in January 1980 forcing him to resign.

In the changed political scenario, the civil aviation ministry, which has proposed renaming of the airport on the demand of the UP government, says it would be a befitting tribute to the farmer leader from western Uttar Pradesh, which is also the political base of Ajit Singh’s RLD.

The Lucknow airport derives its name Amausi from the village, where it is situated. There have also been demands to rename Amausi airport in the name of local heroes like Chandra Bhanu Gupta, architect of modern Lucknow.

Renaming of airports had political dimensions in India. The decision of civil aviation ministry to rename the new Hyderabad airport after former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had irked TDP because a domestic terminal at the older Hyderabad airport was in the name of party’s founding member N.T. Rama Rao.

The TDP has already announced that it would name the domestic terminal after Rao, if they come to power.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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