Ex-minister Captain Ajay Yadav blames Bhupinder Hooda for Congress' defeat in Haryana polls

CHANDIGARH: Bhupinder Hooda’s former cabinet colleague and six-time MLA Captain Ajay Yadav on Tuesday launched a vitriolic attack on the outgoing chief minister, holding him squarely responsible for the Congress party’s poll debacle in the Haryana assembly election.
In a no-holds-barred interview with ET, Yadav said “Hooda’s blue-eyed leaders benefited immensely by granting change of land use certificates in various districts of the state.” Yadav said Hooda’s “best friend”, Venod Sharma, and close aide Gopal Kanda made hay in Hooda’s regime, he alleged.

The former minister, who lost the election from Rewari, alleged that his proximity with the Gandhi family, especially Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, had made Hooda “insecure”.

As a result Hooda divested him of key portfolios and made him “toothless”, Yadav said. Yadav also alleged that Hooda and his MP son Deepender Singh Hooda targeted his son Chiranjeev Rao. “My son was the elected president of the Youth Congress in the State. Hooda and his son made sure that Chiranjeev did not get accommodated in the Indian Youth Congress.”

“Hooda divested me of the finance minister portfolio. Then he gave me portfolios where all the powers are vested with the chairman and the minister has little say,” Yadav said. “He gave me forest department. There are no forests in Haryana.”

He said Sonia Gandhi had to intervene when Hooda refused to allow any University in Yadav’s constituency. Yadav said he had personally brought the issue of “discrimination in jobs and lopsided growth” to the notice of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi.

He said that when he was divested of the finance ministry he was assured by the Congress top brass that his portfolio would be restored within four months, but nothing happened for two years. Yadav, however, refused to comment anything on the Congress high command.

Yadav was the first Congress leader to raise the issue of “arbitrary land acquisition” in the state, an issue on which the Hooda government was cornered and earned wrath of the Punjab &Haryana High Court.

Despite the UPA bringing up a new land acquisition Act, “land in Haryana was acquired under the old provisions of the Act”, he alleged. He said land in his own constituency was acquired under the old provisions.