Amit Shah to have dinner at BJP leader Sunil Jakhar's residence in Panchkula

|HT|

Union home minister Amit Shah will have dinner at Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sunil Jakhar's residence in Haryana's Panchkula on Saturday. Shah will be in Panchkula to launch the Khelo India Youth Games-2021 at the Tau Devi Lal Complex. Shah's meeting with Sunil Jakhar comes weeks after the latter quit the Congress on May 14. In a Facebook live session, Jakhar said that Congress leaders sitting in Delhi had 'ruined the party in Punjab' and blamed senior leader Ambika Soni's statement on the 'repercussions of having a Hindu chief minister' for the party's disastrous showing in this year's state assembly elections. And on May 19, Sunil Jakhar was inducted into the BJP in the presence of party national president JP Nadda.

Addressing a press conference, Jakhar, the former Punjab Congress president, slammed the grand old party and accused it of insulting the spirit of brotherhood in the state by trying to divide it in terms of percentages of castes, communities and religion. Recalling the five-decade association of his family with the Congress, Jakhar said he decided to quit the day attempts were made to silence his voice by issuing a show-cause notice for making certain remarks. "If Sunil Jakhar had to break a 50-year relationship... There were some fundamental issues. There was no personal dispute. The dispute was regarding nationalism and the integrity of Punjab. The harmony of the state which could not be broken by bullets of AK-47 rifles," Jakhar said during the press conference on May 19.

Hours after, the Punjab Congress said that Sunil Jakhar might have formally joined the BJP now but he had been working for the saffron party long before and was playing blatant Hindutva politics. "There was a reason for him to rake up 'Hindu' card and the reason was revealed today," Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh Raja Warring tweeted.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)