DAVANAGERE : It was a day of embarrassment for the BJP, with
national president Amit Shah
and Dharwad BJP MP Pralhad Joshi making inadvertent
gaffes in public
, handing the Congress a stick to beat it with and setting off a gleeful deluge of jibes on Twitter.
While Shah called BJP chief ministerial candidate B S Yeddyurappa corrupt, Joshi said Narendra Modi had done nothing for the SC/ ST community.
Interacting with the media during a tour of Lingayat and Dalit mutts in central Karnataka, Shah began making allegations against the Siddaramaiah government. “Recently, a retired Supreme Court judge said if ever there was a competition for the most corrupt government, then the Yeddyurappa government will get number one...” he said, shocking Yeddyurappa and the BJP leadership.
Party MP Pralhad Joshi immediately leaned over to whisper into Shah’s ear: “Siddaramaiah government.” A stunned Yeddyurappa also reminded Shah that he should have said “Siddaramaiah government was number one in corruption”. Realizing his gaffe, Shah corrected himself in seconds, “Arre re…Siddaramaiah government is number one in corruption.”
Then it was the turn of Joshi who wrongly translated Shah’s speech from Hindi into Kannada. After Shah launched a scathing attack against Siddaramaiah for not doing anything for the SC and ST communities in the state, Joshi translated it as: “Narendra Modi did not do anything for the SC/STs.”
The gaffe was not corrected, and Joshi tried to mask it by moving ahead, but it was recorded and went viral within minutes of the public rally concluding.
The Congress was quick to leap on to Shah’s faux pas, with AICC president Rahul Gandhi hitting Twitter with: “Now that the BJP IT cell has announced
Karnataka elections, time for a sneak preview of our top secret campaign video! Gifted to us by the BJP President, our campaign in Karnataka is off to a fabulous start. He says Yeddyurappa ran the most corrupt Govt ever... True.”
Siddaramaiah also took to social media and thanked Shah, claiming that the BJP president was “finally speaking the truth”. Others called it Shah’s ‘Mann ki Baat’.
Reacting to the jibe, Yeddyurappa said Shah’s faux pas was just a slip of the tongue and nothing more. “Siddaramaiah is stupid. Let him count the number of times he has committed such gaffes, abusing his own government,” he said.
This is the second time in a month that Shah has embarrassed his party unit in Karnataka. In his earlier goof-up, Shah had called Vidwat Lokanath, a private individual who was brutally attacked allegedly by Congress MLA N A Haris’ son Mohammad Nalpad, a BJP man. He had to retract his statement immediately.
‘Next govt will be farmers’ govt’
A BJP wave is sweeping Karnataka and the ‘Mushti Dhanya collection abhiyan’ will continue throughout the state. The next government will be the farmers’ government, headed by B S Yeddyurappa, national BJP president Amit Shah said on Tuesday at Dodda Baathi village near Davanagere.
Before addressing the public, Shah and Yeddyurappa collected mushti dhanya from five farmers selected from Dodda Baathi village. The foodgrains collected from the farmers’ houses will be cooked and eaten by all the farmers and BJP local leaders, Shah said. “Thus, the farmers’ blood will flow through the foodgrains,” he said.
He hailed the various welfare schemes drawn up by PM Narendra Modi for the benefit of farmers, including fixing of crop prices at one-and-half times more than the actual investment made on their crops, Shah said. He came down heavily on the Siddaramaiah-led government for more than 3,500 suicides among farmers. “There are no suicide cases in Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, where the BJP ruled for 15 years,” Shah claimed. “In Maharashtra too, suicide cases have come down by 30% in the past three years.”
The Centre will be taking up research on arecanut and coconut, and provide solutions to benefit producers, Shah said.
He appealed to voters to elect the BJP candidate and get at least 150 seats in the assembly polls.
Mushti Dhanya for unity
The five farmers selected to give Mushti Dhanya belong to the Nayaka (Talavara), Uppara, Kuruba and Lingayat castes, and live in Talavara honi (Gram Panchayat Office Road) in Dodda Baathi village. The farmers, Basavarajappa Kannavara, Parashappa, Umesh NM, Veeresh PM and Kabballi Shekharappa own land near the village, as it is a tail-end region, to get Bhadra canal water. They grow paddy, maize, jowar, ragi, turdal, cotton, tomato etc.
Farmer names son Modi
Veeresh, a small-scale farmer who owns 1.5acres of land on which he grows tomato and maize, said his fouryear-son is called ‘Modi’. “The family is very fond of PM Narendra Modi, and soon after Modi took oath as PM, I decided to name my son Modi,” Veeresh said. His wife Sharada is a member of the Dodda Baathi GP. He is one of the famers from whom mushti dhanya was collected.
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