PIONEER EDGE NEWS SERVICE/ Dehradun
The Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) Ganesh Godiyal has said that the office bearers of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Badrinath-Kedarnath Temple Committee (BKTC) are deliberately twisting facts to mislead the public in the offering theft case in Badrinath Dham. Addressing the mediapersons at Uttaranchal Press Club on Tuesday, Godiyal said that the BKTC chairman Hemant Dwivedi had publicly challenged him to a debate. “I accepted his challenge in all seriousness and arrived at the Press Club at 12:30 PM today at the scheduled time. However, the challenger himself is missing,” he said.
Godiyal said that anyone who publicly challenges someone to a debate and then fails to appear puts his own credibility into question. Reacting to the claims made by the BJP and BKTC chairman, Godiyal clarified that the arrested accused in the case, Pramod Nautiyal was appointed in the BKTC in 2003. In 2010, during the BJP government, a proposal for his regularisation was sent to the government and the government approved it in 2014 when he was the chairman of the BKTC. He added that the decision to regularize Nautiyal was made at the government level.
Godiyal said that the real question is, during whose tenure did the alleged theft of donations at Badrinath Dham occur? “If questions are being raised about the security of temple donations, CCTV footage reveals missing bundles of notes and serious questions are being raised about the functioning of the temple committee, then the current management and the current government are responsible for it,’’ he said.
Godiyal said that Congress neither shies away from facts nor from facing the debates. “Protecting the temple’s donations, management and the faith of devotees is the supreme responsibility of the government and the temple committee. Strictest possible action should be taken against those responsible in this case, and a transparent investigation should be conducted into the entire matter,’’ he said.
