Congress getting people from Maharashtra to win polls : Smriti Irani

BJP leader and Union Minister Smriti Irani on Thursday said the Congress is desperate to come to power in Karnataka and that it is getting people from neighbouring Maharashtra to win the border constituency. She said the Congress is fighting elections raising the Marathi issue but has not undertaken any development in this region, which is dominated by Marathi-speaking population.

Irani also alleged that the opposition party promoted reservation based on religion at the cost of other deprived communities for the sake of vote bank politics and now has filed a petition in the Supreme Court after the Karnataka government scrapped the 4 per cent Muslim quota. Khanapur is one of the 18 constituencies in Belagavi district, which has the second highest number of assembly seats after Bengaluru Urban. Irani is on tour in the district for election campaign for the May 10 Karnataka polls. Addressing a gathering of 6,000-odd people here, the Union Minister alleged the Congress has a habit of showing dreams to the poor. It has been doing politics showing dreams and did the same in Amethi Lok Sabha constituency in Uttar Pradesh for 40 years. “I defeated Rahul Gandhi on his home turf. Rahul Gandhi was there for 15 years and the Gandhi family for 40 years. I hail from an ordinary family and went there to defeat him,” she said. The reasons were– about 80 per cent of people in Amethi did not have water and power and about 10 lakh people did not have a house to reside. The first x-ray machine and dialysis centre was opened by the Modi government and even the district collector’s office was built by the BJP government. “I am a direct witness of the kind of governance in Amethi. You (Congress) have looted Amethi for 40 years, will not let you loot Khanapur,” she said and urged people to vote for Lotus, the BJP’s symbol, on May 10. She further alleged Congress was creating “confusion” in Khanapur with a sole reason to win the seat to be in power, but BJP wants to win to do development work. “The Congress is getting people from Maharashtra to fight elections in Khanapur. Why is Congress not able to get dedicated workers to work in the assembly elections? There are two reasons for this,” she said.

One reason is that Marathi-speaking people will never support a party which has insulted pioneering Hindutva ideologue Veer Savarkar and secondly they will not believe in Rahul Gandhi who travels abroad most of the time and appears just before the elections, she added. She also criticised the Congress for doing politics of Muslim vote bank wherever it was in power, by insulting different Hindu castes and for joining hands with parties like TMC, headed by Mamata Bannerjee in whose state an elderly woman was raped allegedly to punish a particular community. Irani also listed out development works undertaken by the BJP during the covid-19 pandemic including free vaccine and free foodgrains to the needy people besides health benefits under the Ayushman Bharat scheme. In Khanapur, there are a total 2.11 lakh voters, with 1.09 lakh male and 1.02 lakh female voters. There is a straight fight between BJP candidate Vittal Rao Halgekar and Congress’ Anjali Nimbalkar here. The Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti (MES) has also fielded a candidate in this constituency where Kannada speaking population is in minority.