Hamirpur (HP), July 4 (PTI) Leader of Opposition in Himachal Pradesh Assembly Jai Ram Thakur on Thursday hit out at the chief minister who blamed him for ignoring Hamirpur in matters of development.

"During my tenure as the chief minister, equal treatment was given to all parts of the state including Hamirpur which is the citadel of the BJP. Whatever development is seen in Hamirpur today is due to the successive BJP governments," Thakur said, while talking to media persons here.

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Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu had on Wednesday alleged that Thakur ignored Hamirpur to weaken ex-CM P K Dhumal.

"The Hamirpur district suffered a great loss due to Prem Kumar Dhumal's defeat as Jai Ram Thakur discriminated against the district. Neither any minister was made from Hamirpur nor was any development work undertaken in the district in the last tenure of the Jai Ram government," Sukhu had said.

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The chief minister was making such accusations fully knowing that the Congress party had failed to fulfil the aspirations and commitments made to the people on the eve of the 2022 assembly polls, Thakur said.

The byelections to the three assembly seats of Dehra, Hamirpur and Nalagarh will be held on July 10. These seats fell vacant after three Independent legislators, who voted in favour of the BJP in the Rajya Sabha polls held in February, resigned from the Vidhan Sabha and joined the party.

Thakur asked the chief minister to clarify to the people what he had done for Hamirpur during the last 15 months. He alleged that the chief minister had failed to nurse even his own constituency of Nadaun that falls in Hamirpur.

Earlier, while addressing a series of election meetings in Hamirpur, Thakur said if he was in Sukhu's place, he would have resigned if he could not even develop his own area.

He accused the chief minister of completely failing to take all the MLAs along. This is the reason why the political situation of the state is moving in a different direction today, he added.

"If the work of all the MLAs had been done on time and no discrimination of any kind had been made among them, then such a situation would not have arisen," Thakur added.

The BJP candidate from Hamirpur Assembly seat, Ashish Sharma, said his family does contracting and follows the law. Any contract tender is filled online and there is a record of it. If something wrong has been done, then the chief minister should present all those things before the public at the time of elections, he said.

Sharma was referring to Sukhu's remarks made on Tuesday that he did work worth Rs 50 crore in the previous BJP government, while he took contracts worth Rs 135 crore in the 14 months of the Congress government.

"He (Sharma) is a greedy and arrogant person. His intentions are bad and that's why he sold himself in the political 'mandi' (market) of the BJP," Sukhu had alleged.

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