New Delhi/Chandigarh: Former vice-president Jagdeep Dhankhar shifted from his official residence to a private farmhouse in the Chhatarpur area of south Delhi on Monday evening, six weeks after he resigned from his post, according to officials.
The farmhouse in the Gadaipur area of Chhatarpur belongs to INLD leader Abhay Chautala.
An official told news agency that Dhankhar will stay in the private farmhouse as an interim arrangement till he is allocated a Type-VIII official residence, which he is entitled to as a former vice-president.
The Union Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry, however, has not yet received any formal request from Dhankhar for allotment of a government bungalow, another official said.
Abhay Chautala, the son of ex-Haryana chief minister O P Chautala, confirmed that the former vice-president has moved into the farmhouse in Chhatarpur. “We have old family ties with him. He is like a family member. I don’t have to offer him to stay in our house, it is his own house,” the INLD leader said.
Dhankhar shared close ties with former deputy prime minister Devi Lal and his son, the ex-chief minister of Haryana Om Prakash Chautala. Devi Lal died in 2001, while O P Chautala passed away in December last year. The former vice-president had attended O P Chautala’s last rites in the Khera village of Sirsa district.
Highlighting the close ties the former vice-president shares with the Chautala family, Abhay Chautala said, “We keep talking to each other at regular intervals. During one such interaction, this thing (house shifting) came up, and I told him that till his own house gets ready, it (Chhatarpur farmhouse) was also his own house and he need not go anywhere else.”