Manish Tewari a political tourist

Chandigarh: BJP leader Sanjay Tandon who is making his Lok Sabha election debut from the Chandigarh parliamentary seat said his opponent and senior Congress leader Manish Tewari is a “political tourist” and will look for a new constituency in 2029 to fight polls from.

Tandon, who has been the Chandigarh BJP President for 10 years, exuded confidence that the party will secure a hat-trick of wins from the constituency which will go to polls in the seventh phase on June 1.

“Manish Tewari is a political tourist... In 1991, he went to Kanpur to contest election... even before he reached the constituency people objected and he was sent back to Delhi from the airport itself,” Tandon told PTI in an interview. “Since then he has been behaving like this only. He goes to a constituency, tries to play with the system there. He has been elected twice from two different constituencies. The question that comes to the mind of people in Chandigarh is why did he leave Ludhiana?” he asked.

Tandon, son of six-time MLA and former Chhattisgarh governor Balramji Das Tandon, is a chartered accountant by profession. He said Tewari was elected from Ludhiana in 2009 and served as the Information and Broadcasting Minister in the Manmohan Singh government but “he did not deliver”. “He ran away (in 2014 polls)... In, 2019 he found a new constituency (Anantpur Sahib), he pledged there that ‘I don’t want to go to Chandigarh’... whatever he said he went back on. Besides being a political tourist, he also goes back on his words,” Tandon added.