Gurdaspur

Vinod Khanna (BJP)

Won from Gurdaspur: 1998, 1999 
Votes for Khanna: 47.01 per cent (last election)

• Only 815 of Gurdaspur’s 1,546 villages are covered by government schemes, with 1,522 villages being identified as water-scarce.
  
  
• No speciality hospitals. People have to go to Amritsar or Jammu for treatment. Just two 100-bed hospitals. Patient to bed ratio is 0.7 beds per 1,000—the lowest in Punjab.
  
  
• Only two government colleges. No girls’ college

As MP from Gurdaspur, Vinod Khanna is the chairman of the district vigilance and monitoring committee for centrally-sponsored schemes, mandated to meet at least twice every year, presided over by the MP. But over the past two years, he has chaired just one meeting. Both in 1998 and 1999, Khanna managed to sway people with starry promises: an institute to train people for the film industry, getting the area declared industrially backward to attract new industry and generate employment, using his contacts to get industrial projects.... None of this has happened, though. AndGurdaspur, which was once one of the key nerve-centres of the bloody Khalistani militancy, continues to languish in its backwardness.

Six months ago he appointed a crony to propagate the PM’s Swajal Dhara Pariyojana to provide clean drinking water in Narot, Jaimal, Sujanpur and Pathankot assembly segments. Nothing has happened.

Even the BJP workers allege Khanna spends all his time with the rich of his constituency. Says former BJP legislator Ram Lal: "Whenever he comes to Pathankot, he is cloistered with his coterie comprising Pathankot’s rich, at the Chamera rest house." Khanna’s office-cum-residence here is a derelict cobweb-ridden bungalow manned by a lone chowkidar. At Jakria village, sarpanch Mandeep Kaur says: "I am his party worker but I get to know of his rare visits only from newspapers."

But since elections were in the air, Khanna recommended 600 projects worth Rs 6 crore from his MP’s fund on January 30, a week before Parliament was dissolved. When it was brought to his notice that it wasn’t possible to get the money released so quickly, he asked the district administration to release 25 per cent of the total cost as "he had political compulsions". Result: the Bharat Vikas Parishad, Berhampur, doesn’t know what to make of the Rs 50,000 it’s received for an ambulance that costs Rs 2 lakh. Similarly, 35 panchayats have got Rs 12,500 to construct toilets, which need Rs 50,000 each. Says Jakaria’s Navtej Singh: "It would have been better if we had not got this money."