Airborne till last week, Khattar takes to cycling on polling day

Until Saturday when the campaigning for the Haryana assembly elections concluded, chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar rarely travelled by road and remained airborne crisscrossing various parts of the state.

On Monday and little before people across the state started coming out of their homes to cast their votes, Khattar boarded the Jan Shatabdi train in Chandigarh to reach Karnal. And then the first-time MLA hired an e-rickshaw to reach home from where he picked up a bicycle to reach the polling booth no 174 of Karnal’s Prem Nagar to cast his vote.

Khattar, the star campaigner of the BJP, began campaigning for the party nominees after filing his nomination papers on October 1. He addressed over 60 rallies in nearly all districts during the 19-day campaigning.

The CM said he decided to reach the polling booth riding a bicycle to spread awareness about environment.

Earlier, Khattar informed via Twitter that during the two-hour train journey he “had a lively interaction with my co-passengers during my journey to Karnal to cast my vote”.

“By reaching the booth on bicycle and e-rickshaw I made an appeal to the people to make all possible efforts to stop pollution,” Khattar told reporters after casting his vote.

Later, Khattar released his photographs sipping tea at a roadside dhaba along the GT Road. In the morning, he had tweeted photographs sitting in a train in which he reached Karnal from Chandigarh.

The BJP workers were waiting for the chief minister at the Karnal railway station from where he hired an e-rickshaw to reach his house in Prem Nagar and from his house he rode a bicycle to reach to the polling booth.

People of Karnal, greeted him on the way to polling booth. But his security officials had to face a tough time due to the traffic in the congested city roads.