"As the employment rules and service conditions do not apply to the retired personnel, we have no say in their meeting with Gandhi. Regarding working employees, some of them may meet him as union members of the HAL Employees Association," an official told news agency IANS. 

Gandhi who will land in the city Saturday afternoon, is likely to spend an hour and a half at Minsk Square before returning to Delhi the same evening. The Congress party has cancelled the rally it had planned in the outskirts of the city.

 

Congress President Shri. Rahul Gandhi will have an interaction tomorrow (13-Oct-2018) at 3-30pm. regarding the injustice done to HAL in the #RafaleDeal at Minsk Square, Bangalore.#RahulGandhiWithHAL pic.twitter.com/eHgm3K2N3Y

— Karnataka Congress (@INCKarnataka) October 12, 2018

During the interaction, Gandhi is likely to elicit the opinion of employees about the company getting a raw deal from the Modi government on the Rafale deal depriving them of jobs and high end technical work which could have come through if the previous UPA government's deal on Rafale was implemented.

The Congress, which has been accusing the government of benefiting the Reliance Defence Ltd of Anil Ambani from the deal, has also been demanding answers on why the state-run aerospace major HAL was not involved in the deal as finalised during the UPA. 

The party had been accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of snatching jobs of people of Karnataka by taking away the contract from HAL. 

Gandhi had been saying that had HAL been selected in place of Reliance Defence it could have generated employment to scores of unemployed youth in the state. 

The  Congress party has also ben alleging grave irregularities in the deal. The party states that the Modi government has been procuring each aircraft at a cost of over Rs 1,670 crore as against Rs 526 crore finalised by the UPA government in 2012. 

However, the BJP has dismissed all allegations as false. 

Modi had announced the procurement of 36 Rafale fighters after holding talks with then French President Francois Hollande on April 10, 2015, in Paris.