By IANS,
Kolkata : A day after creating a flutter when he broke the security cordon to shake hands with people during an election rally at Purulia in West Bengal, Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi Saturday denied it was a security breach and said such meetings were cleared by his security staff in advance.
“I am not breaching security, it is discussed with my security personnel. They allow me. I like meeting people and the meetings are decided for one or two places. They (commandos of the Special Protection Group) decide it. So there is no security breach,” Rahul Gandhi told reporters here.
He explained: “For example, yesterday (Friday) when we did that in Purulia it was not actually a breach of security. We go to the place where I’m allowed to do that (meet people),” he said.
The son of Congress president Sonia Gandhi had done something similar during a visit to Orissa earlier this month. He went for a stroll on the busy road of Bolangir town without the knowledge of the local police.
Earlier, in March last year, during a four-day trip to Orissa, he travelled to a village in Koraput district – considered a hotbed of Maoist activity – without the knowledge of the local administration, and spent nearly four hours there.
Asked by reporters if his sister Priyanka scolds him for such acts, Rahul Gandhi said: “My sister scolds me for a lot of things and I scold her also.”