Congress government in Karnataka is anti-Hindu, has alliance with SDPI: BJP

Bengaluru, Jan 1: BJP charged the Congress government in Karnataka with being ‘anti-Hindu’ as it had not booked killers of BJP and RSS activists over the past couple of years, released PFI activists and ‘divided’ Lingayats, all for electoral gains.

“The Siddaramaiah government is anti-Hindu. It has not brought to book killers of 20-odd BJP and RSS leaders in the past couple of years, whereas it has been in talks with SDPI for a pre-poll alliance,” senior BJP leader Ananth Kumar said. The biggest testimony for this was talks KPCC Chief G Parameshwara had with Social Demoractic Party of India (the political wing of Popular Front of India), for a pre-poll alliance between Congress and the party, he said. The Siddramaiah government had also released about 100 leaders of PFI, “an outfit criticised by people who have been demanding a ban on it,” Kumar told reporters here. Without mentioning the burning issue of separate religious status for Lingayats, Kumar lambasted the government for ‘dividing’ the community for electoral gains.

These three issues proved that the Congress government was anti-hindu and their actions were for gains in the polls, he alleged. Amid raging differences on the issue of separate religion status to Veerashivas/Lingayats, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had said on December 25 that he was not making any attempts to divide any religion. The demand for a separate religion tag to these faiths has surfaced amidst resentment from within over projecting the two sects as the same. The Veerashaiva Mahasabha’ asserts that Veerashaiva and Lingayats are the same, while the other group wants the separate religion tag only for Lingayats. The latter believes that Veerashaiva is one among the seven sects of Shaivas, which is part of Hinduism. BJP and several sections of the Hindu community have maintained a cautious stance keeping away from the move to give Veerashaiva/Lingayat separate religion status. On the party’s assessment of the electoral ramifications of the Lingayat issue, Kumar said the question was of people s being ‘fed up’ with failure of law and order, farmers’ plight, the economy and communal disharmony, among others.

Referring to special meeting under BJP national president Amit Shah here today, he said the party chalked out a single line agenda of registering a win in the 2018 assembly polls. One of the most important strategies to be adopted was deployment of “page pramukhs” who would be assigned the task of issues relating to voters lists and kickstarting a door-to-door campaign to woo voters at the booth level. However, this was not the Gujarat model because the page pramukhs have been in vogue for the past two-and-a-half years, including in Uttar Pradesh elections, where BJP registered a resounding victory, he said By January 16, the party would prepare ‘chargesheets’ of various ‘irregularities’ by Congress leaders in respective constituencies, he said. From February 17 to 22, BJP would distribute the ‘chargesheets’ to people in each constituency, he said.