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| Fog paralyses political activity |
| BS Reporters / New Delhi Dec 30, 2008, 01:18 IST |
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Till late evening today it remained uncertain if Union Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh would be able to attend a programme in Hyderabad on Tuesday where President Pratibha Patil is the chief guest.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi had planned to meet the Abdullahs of the National Conference in the evening to discuss the crucial issue of forming the next government in Jammu and Kashmir. The meeting had to be cancelled. She also had to meet her party colleagues — former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and J&K Congress unit President Saifuddin Soz, but again the schedule went haywire.
Rural Development secretary Rita Sharma had to spend more than three hours at the Delhi airport as her flight kept getting postponed.
As dense fog continued to cover the skyline of the capital, along with the thousands of passengers, many important government and political schedules also suffered as flights and trains got delayed.
On Tuesday, President Pratibha Patil would be inaugurating the golden jubilee programmes of the National Institute of Rural Development at Hyderabad. While Patil had reached the state capital of Andhra Pradesh yesterday, the Union minister was still stuck at Delhi today as his flight was getting delayed. “Already, for the past few months, the number of flights have been reduced for different destinations. And now, the schedules are jeopardised because of the fog,” one of his officers said.
Singh’s office even tried to get a ticket in an alternative flight but failed as it was overbooked because of cancellation of earlier flights.
In the railway ministry, a meeting of the mechanical department had to be postponed as some of the officers travelling in Rajdhani Express from Kolkata couldn’t reach the capital before noon. Everyday, most of the trains travelling through North India are getting delayed as they face dense fog on many areas of their routes.
Fog has also hit the process of the government formation in J&K. Azad, Soz, Omar and Farooq Abdullah — all of them had to come from J&K today but the flight schedules were delayed. While Azad and Soz could finally meet Gandhi late in the evening, the Abdullahs had to cancel their meeting with Gandhi due to paucity of time. Gandhi even asked External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who heads the J&K committee of the party, to come back to Delhi from Kolkata for the next series of meetings. Although Mukherjee cancelled his programmes in Kolkata, he too couldn’t reach Delhi in time.
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