Lucknow: After Ram and Ramayana, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seems to be turning its attention towards the Mahabharata. BJP MLC Yeshwant Singh has written a letter to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, requesting him to restore the lost glory of Hastinapur.
In his letter, the MLC has said that in the past 72 years, no attention has been paid to Hastinapur that was the country’s capital at one point of time. He has further said that he has visited Hastinapur twice in recent months and has found the fort in Hastinapur to be in a dilapidated condition.
“The fort needs to be renovated and its boundary wall reconstructed. There is a great deal of encroachment in the area and a graveyard has been built on the remains of the palace of King Shantanu,” Yeshwant Singh said.
The MLC said that first attempt to renovate the historic city was undertaken by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in 1949, but the Congress never got down to actually initiating the work on the project.
“Now that the Yogi Adityanath government is here, we can hope for a renovation of a city that is an integral part of history as well as mythology,” he said. Hastinapur is now a part of Meerut district.
Yeshwant Singh is the former Samajwadi Paty MLC who had resigned from his seat to enable Yogi Adityanath to become a member of the Vidhan Parishad in 2017. Singh later joined the BJP and became MLC again.