External affairs ministry officials assaulted after they try to stop tampering of pilgrims’ list.
Three Ministry of External Affairs officials were assaulted in Lucknow as the tussle between the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) government in Uttar Pradesh and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre spilled over into the Haj pilgrimage.
Reports had been doing the rounds of South Block, the headquarters of the external affairs ministry, that Mayawati’s supporters were trying to influence the list of those selected for the pilgrimage from Lucknow by including their own nominees.
On Tuesday, the ministry went into a tizzy when complaints began pouring in that local BSP politicians had assaulted the representatives of the Haj Committee of India (HCI) in Lucknow. “We were informed that they (the officials) were thrown out of the room where the names of the pilgrims were being finalised”, said a senior ministry official.
The BSP put the onus squarely on the Centre saying that till date over 3,500 pilgrims had not been allowed to board the flights due to visa-related problems. Naseemuddin, the state minister for Waqf and Haj, said: “It is the Centre which is responsible for this trouble. Due to lack of co-ordination on the part of the external affairs ministry, the pilgrims are facing problems. The officials faced the wrath of the Haj pilgrims when they tried to physically hand over the visa papers.”
According to practice, three HCI officers went to Lucknow on Tuesday to meet the local Haj committee members to process the list of pilgrims. In the afternoon, South Block got information that “Mayawati’s men assaulted” them, threw them out of the room and then processed the papers on their own. “How can they do this? Isn’t there any law in the country?” asked an officer.
Many Delhi-based politicians called up the ministry to complain after they got calls from those who were robbed of their chance to visit Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. Naseemuddin denies these charges. “The irate mob of pilgrims, which had been gheraoing the officials for the last one week, went on the rampage on Tuesday and started misbehaving with the staff of the external affairs ministry,” he said.
Lucknow is among the prominent embarkment points for the Haj pilgrims, apart from Srinagar, Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad.
This year, the external affairs ministry managed an increase in the number of people it can send for the pilgrimage. “The government of India requested the Royal Government of Saudi Arabia to provide an additional quota of 15,000 to India in response to which the quota for India has been increased by 10,991 seats. Thus the total quota for India for Haj in 2008 is 167,991 as compared with 157,000 in 2007,” Minister of State for External Affairs E Ahmed had informed Parliament recently.
