Kirron goes slow on campaigning, junks rumours

Sushil Manav
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, April 18

With BJP MP Kirron Kher going slow on campaigning in Chandigarh for the past few days, speculation is rife that the party is contemplating shifting her to some other constituency, particularly Amritsar in Punjab.

Kher started her campaign this evening when she visited the Sai temple in Sector 29. The other programme scheduled for today was a meeting with Andrew Ayre, British Deputy High Commissioner in Chandigarh.

Yesterday, she visited Jain Mandir, Sector 27, to pay her respects on the occasion of Mahavir Jayanti and visited EWS flats in Dhanas under her “Coffee with Kirron” programme.

Kirron skipped an important BJP event on Tuesday when the party’s election in-charge for Chandigarh and Haryana Minister Capt Abhimanyu flagged off two campaign vehicles for the parliamentary poll.

City BJP chief Sanjay Tandon and additional solicitor general Satya Pal Jain, both political rivals of the BJP MP within the party, were present on the occasion.

Interestingly, the schedule of programmes issued by her media team for Tuesday included only two events, both in the evening, while the party’s programme was in the morning.

The BJP is yet to announce its candidate from Chandigarh, while the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party have already fielded former union ministers Pawan Kumar Bansal and Harmohan Dhawan, respectively, from this seat.

Besides Kher, Tandon and Jain are also in the race for the party ticket.

Kher, who was seen quite active in the constituency ever since she launched her campaign over a month ago, suddenly decided to “go slow” on her programmes.

The Tribune has learnt that amid the speculation of being shifted to some other constituency, Kher has deliberately adopted a “wait-and-watch” policy.

Kher, however, rubbished the talk of her being shifted to some other constituency, saying that rumours were being spread deliberately by her opponents. “These are not new speculations; my opponents have been spreading rumours for quite some time. Sometimes they say I am being shifted to Amritsar, at other times, they say Gurdaspur. This is all baseless,” she said.

Refuting reports of her “go-slow” attitude on the campaign, Kirron said she had been participating in public events almost every day.

“Active campaigning will start only after the party announces the ticket. However, even now, I have been meeting people, visiting places of worship and holding meetings every day,” she said.

On her absence from the party’s event where the campaign vehicles were flagged off by Capt Abhimanyu, Kirron said it was not a major event and she received information at a very late stage when she had already fixed her programmes for the day.