Haryana Budget session: Manohar Lal Khattar, Bhupinder Hooda spar over ‘mission merit’

Pradeep Sharma

Chandigarh, February 21

CM Manohar Lal Khattar and Leader of the Opposition Bhupinder Singh Hooda today engaged in a slugfest over the BJP-JJP government’s much-touted “mission merit” of providing government jobs in a transparent manner.

The provocation for the war of words was provided by allegations levelled by former Speaker and Congress MLA Raghubir Kadian about irregularities in government recruitment during Khattar’s reply to a debate on the Governor’s Address in the Budget Session here today.

As Khattar was replying to the discussion on the Address, Kadian raked up the issue of the seizure of an alleged CD containing conversation between two persons about malpractices in the exams conducted by the HPSC and investigation into a recruitment scam.

While Khattar claimed that no CD was recovered, Kadian insisted that even Hooda had raised the issue in the last session of the Vidhan Sabha, saying that he had referred to a chat between two persons in the alleged CD through a document.

Khattar dared Hooda to provide the document containing the chat, to which Hooda hit back asking the government to either accept the existence of the CD or deny its existence. He claimed that repeated job scams belied the government’s claims of transparency.

Khattar asserted that the BJP-JJP government’s merit-based recruitment system could be compared with Congress rule by the number of recruitment drives scrapped by various courts during the respective regimes.

As Kadian was adamant about the existence of the CD, Khattar threatened him with a privilege motion for misleading the House. Even Speaker Gian Chand Gupta told Kadian that he must back his allegations

with evidence.