Exactly four months after being sworn in as the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chauhan on July 25 tested Corona positive. The announcement in this regard was made by Chauhan himself through a tweet. The news of Chauhan testing positive came following surge in number of cases of COVID-19 in several cities and towns of Madhya Pradesh.
The state government had only on July 24 imposed 10-day long lockdown in Bhopal. It started from 8:00 PM on July 24 and will last till August 4. On July 23 cooperative minister Arvind Singh Bhadoria had tested positive for Corona Virus. Bhadoria accompanied Chauhan in a special plane to Lucknow to pay last respect to the state governor Lalji Tandon who died in UP’s capital on July 21.
Former chief ministers Kamal Nath and Uma Bharati wished him early recovery. However, senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh, while praying for early recovery of Chauhan, said that the Madhya Pradesh chief minister himself violated the rules laid down for maintaining social distancing.
He said that though an FIR has been lodged against him yet the chief minister himself violated it. He also referred to the way Chauhan government came to power by engineering split and buying MLAs to bring down the Kamal Nath government when Corona was knocking at the door of the country.
It is alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed lockdown on March 24 evening after hurriedly getting Chauhan installed as the chief minister on the night of March 23. For one full month he worked alone with no minister in his cabinet. This led to the utter apathy by the state government officials and the public health secretary on April 5 herself tested positive.
Other senior bureaucrats too suffered from the pandemic. Indore and Bhopal emerged as the hotspots of Corona Virus. The BJP ruled Gujarat too came under strong criticism for the failure in tackling COVID-19, especially after the Namaste Trump programme in Ahmedabad on Feb 24
–By TheNewsweb Special Correspondent
