Gurgaon: Senior AAP leader and Lok Sabha candidate from Gurgaon Yogendra Yadav said Friday there was nothing secret in his meeting Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
On the allegations about his meeting Gandhi and Hooda, Yadav said, “A delegation from Mewat met Rahul Gandhi in 2008 demanding medical college for Mewat in the name of some Meo (Muslim). I was part of the delegation.”
“The delegation of Meos comprising Ramzan Chaudhary, the then Mewat head of NGO ‘Sampurna Kranti Dal’, met Rahul Gandhi in 2008 in Delhi as there was a recommendation of a medical college by the National Capital Region (NCR) Planning Board and we wanted to set up that college in Mewat,” Yadav said.
Volunteers of Sampurna Kranti Dal sat on dharna from Feb 10 to April 24, 2009, in Mewat in support of their demand for the medical college.
“The medical college in the name of Shaheed Hasan Khan Mewati has been established at Nalhar village near Nuh,” he said.
“The college, approved by the Medical Council of India, started working this year and people of the region are happy with our efforts. What was wrong and secret in that meeting?” Yadav asked.
Similarly, a delegation of nearly 100 farmers from Bawal (Rewari) met Hooda and his cabinet colleague Randeep Singh Surjewala at Haryana Bhawan in New Delhi in 2012.
Yadav told IANS: “Farmers were protesting in Bawal over acquisition of their lands for factories. Violence erupted, in which several farmers and their leaders, including my father Devender Singh, were critically injured. The meeting was for settling farmer issues and their demands.”
Professor Devender Singh, now retired, was then chief of the Sampurna Kranti Dal.
“Hooda and his minister first opposed me for being part of the delegation and refused to meet. But farmers insisted they will not talk to government without me. It was a long talk that finally reached an agreement in the favour of farmers. It was all open and there is nothing to hide. Farmers thanked me for my contributions,” Yadav added.
S.C. Talwar and O.P. Kataria, senior AAP leaders in Gurgaon, who recently quit the party, said they took the step because of the outfit’s alleged proximity to the Congress and not over differences on portfolios.
Talwar, who was the convener of the party’s Lok Sabha committee in the district, said at a meeting held in his house March 20, “we asked Yogendra Yadav if he met Rahul and Sonia Gandhi and he replied in the affirmative. Two years ago, Yadav had gone to Bawal during the farmers’ agitation as a middleman from the state government,” he said.
Yadav said the people who quit the AAP were actually working for the BJP for some time. He said the party’s former district convener Ramesh Yadav was caught on sting saying, “AAP is a cobra, it will bite BJP” and that the party was “worse than cancer.”
Yogendra Yadav recently claimed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, ideological parent of the BJP, is using dirty tricks to infiltrate the Aam Aadmi Party.