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BJP legislators desert Khurana, Sahib Singh

By Sujay Mehdudia

NEW DELHI NOV. 27. It may sound shocking, but it is a fact. The two former BJP Chief Ministers, Madan Lal Khurana and Sahib Singh Verma, seem to have lost sympathy of the legislative wing of the BJP. When both the former Chief Ministers were facing flak from the Congress members in the Delhi Assembly, none from the BJP benches rose to the defence or tried to clarify the position of the esteemed leaders during the debate on Metro Rail issue on Monday.

This has brought into open sharp differences with the Delhi BJP leaders which has shown the party in poor light. As such, except for the Leader of the Opposition, Jagdish Mukhi, and Chief Whip, Nand Kishore Garg, the party has put up a lacklustre show till now in the Vidhan Sabha. But what was most shocking was that member after member from the Treasurey Benches lashed out at Mr. Khurana and Mr. Verma for doing everything possible to delay the Metro Rail project in the Capital. The Congress members gave individual instances where companies were favoured and land acquisition was undertaken or withdrawn under pressure from these two BJP leaders but nothing seemed to move the BJP benches.

In fact, some of the BJP members were seen enjoying the bashing of the two former Chief Ministers and preferred to look the other way despite provocation by the Congress legislators. The silence of Mr. Mukhi, Harsh Vardhan and Harsharan Singh Bali, the former Cabinet colleagues of the two Delhi BJP big guns, was somehow intriguing as they also made no effort to clear the air. In fact, Arvinder Singh Lovely, Kiran Walia and Kiran Chaudhary (Cong) alleged that Mr. Khurana was not at all interested in starting of the Metro Rail project and instead wanted to launch the elevated High Speed Tram System and had even visited some countries in this regard. They alleged that it was Mr. Khurana's over-enthusiasm for the elevated High Speed Trams project that led to the delay in start of the Metro Rail project.

Further more, Mr. Lovely charged that in one instance, Mr. Verma had pressurised the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation authorities to give up land near Najafgarh to build a yard for Metro Rail as the site fell in the area where an associate member of the BJP in the previous Assembly owned land. Now this Yard has come up at Shastri Park in East Delhi. Similarly, they charged both Mr. Khurana and Mr. Verma with doing virtually nothing to start the Metro Rail and even suggested that records of the Urban Development Department of 1993-98 period should be scrutinised to bring out the truth. But there was no reaction from the BJP benches and many of the members kept on smiling instead of rebutting the allegations levelled by the Congress members.

Not only this, even during the participation in the debate on the Metro Rail issue, neither Mr. Mukhi nor any of his other colleagues came to defence of Mr. Khurana or Mr. Verma and sought to clarify the position. Political observers feel that it was clear indication that the party stood divided and the BJP Legislature Party was not willing to stick out its neck to defend their own leaders who were once part of this Vidhan Sabha.

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