Former minister Rakesh Pathania on Thursday denied the allegations that he had interfered in the Nurpur Municipal Council (MC) elections and was working against the BJP-supported candidates in the upcoming Zila Parishad elections levelled by Kangra Lok Sabha MP Rajiv Bhardwaj and Nurpur MLA Ranbir Singh Nikka on Wednesday. Pathania, while addressing mediapersons in Nurpur, said that the MP and the local MLA were creating a fake narrative after the defeat of the BJP-supported candidates in the Nurpur MC elections.
Pathania said that the duo had launched an organised anti-BJP campaign in his native Nurpur Assembly constituency when he was a minister in the previous Jai Ram Thakur government. “To destabilise me politically, a ‘Parivartan Rally’ was organised in Nurpur and posters favouring Nikka were pasted in every nook and corner of my native Assembly constituency. Neither of them had then felt the violation of the party discipline,” he asserted.
Infighting between two factions of the BJP in Nurpur has intensified with party leaders levelling allegations and counter-allegations in the past two days. Pathania alleged that Nikka had fielded his own supporters in all four ZP wards against the official BJP-supported candidates with an aim to defeat them in the Fatehpur Assembly constituency from where he had contested the last state elections on the party ticket in December 2022.
He said that he had been contesting Assembly elections from Nurpur since 1996 and had personal rapport and family relations with the people of the constituency. He could not stop the candidates from contesting the ZP elections by using his photo on posters.
He claimed that it was due to his efforts that the BJP-supported candidates had won the last Nurpur MC elections in 2021, paving the way for the formation of a party-supported body for the first time in history but the party had now seen the results of sidelining him in the recent elections.
Pathania lamented that all ongoing development projects launched in Nurpur during the previous BJP government had come to a standstill in the past three and a half years and the local MLA had failed to get the Mother Child Hospital functional and the circle office of Himachal Pradesh State Electricity Board Ltd inaugurated, continue the construction of a government college building, Phina Singh irrigation project and a multi-storey shopping-cum-parking complex.
