New Delhi: Buoyed over the party’s victory in Himachal Pradesh, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has set his eyes on winning back his home state Karnataka. Kharge, who conducted a massive roadshow in his Kalburgi recently, reviewed the poll preparations with senior leaders on Monday and asked them to prepare a roadmap for the development of the southern state and work together to defeat the ruling BJP.
“Kharge has asked the state unit to carry out agitational programmes over the next 75 days. We will hold big rallies and conventions in Bijapur, Chitradurga and Hubli areas. A state-wide rally will also be organised at every district headquarter. It will then be taken to all the 224 assembly seats,” AICC in charge of Karnataka Randeep Surjewala said.
The meeting had been convened by Kharge to convey the sense of collective leadership, which worked fine in Himachal Pradesh, where there were three key claimants to the chief minister’s post, state unit chief Pratibha Singh, former state unit chief Sukhvinder Sukhu, who was finally chosen as the new chief minister and former CLP leader Mukesh Agnihotri, who is now deputy chief minister.
The Karnataka Congress has been divided between the camps of state unit chief DK Shivkumar and CLP leader K Siddaramaiah. Though the two leaders were seen together when Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra passed through Karnataka recently, there have been concerns that factional fights could dent the party’s prospects in the 2023 assembly polls.
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Surjewala claimed that the party is determined to take back Karnataka from the BJP just like Himachal and has started working towards that goal. He played down the power tussle between the two veterans saying the state leaders were focused on the next year’s victory just like Arjuna of the Mahabharat fame was focused on his target and that the state leaders were not hankering for any post.
“There is no bitterness among the leaders on the chief minister issue. This is a creation of our rivals,” said Surjewala. Kharge who obtained ground-level feedback from the state leaders also asked the AICC managers to finalise the state election committee in a few days so that the Congress can start identifying the potential candidates for the 2023 assembly polls.
The 2018 assembly polls had thrown up a hung house but the Congress managers struck a deal quickly with the JD-S and offered the chief minister’s post to the regional party’s leader HD Kumaraswamy. However, the Congress-JD-S coalition government fell to the machinations of the BJP in 2019 when BS Yeddyurappa became the chief minister.
Since then, the Congress has been targeting the ruling BJP and ran a campaign to highlight the alleged corruption in the state government. State unit chief DK Shivkumar attacked the state government over its alleged moves to polarise the people and said that such campaigns like Hijab and Halal had dented the image of the southern state which is known as an IT hub.
“The Bommai government is a corrupt government. It is known as a 40 percent commission government. We will work together to defeat them in 2023,” said Surjewala.
