Chandigarh: In a major setback to the ruling BJP, its senior leader and former general secretary of the Haryana Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (HSGMC) Gurvinder Singh Dhamija quit party on Thursday and joined Congress.
He was welcomed into the party by the senior Congress leader and former two-time chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda in Rohtak.
Haryana: Ramesh Khattar, the nephew of former Haryana Chief Minister and Union Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, has joined the Congress pic.twitter.com/e7sbcmGO9u
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Speaking on the occasion, Dhamija, who is the chairman of Lohgarh Trust and was also deputy chairman of the Haryana Punjabi Sahitya Academy, rued that the Trust which was the dream project of the former chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, had been neglected, hence his decision to quit party and join Congress.
Dhamija also lauded the previous Hooda-led Congress government when a chair in Shaheed Baba Banda Singh Bahadur’s name was established in Kurukshetra University (KU).
In yet another development which came as a blow to the BJP, Ramit Khattar, the nephew of the former chief minister Khattar – the current Union minister – on Thursday joined Congress in Rohtak. His defection is being seen as a setback to BJP, given his familial ties to the top BJP leader, which puts the party in poor light.