New Delhi: The Congress on Tuesday said it has asked the booth-level teams to be alert on Wednesday when voting will take place in Karnataka as it fears the BJP will play foul.
“The Congress has to be very careful. The BJP will resort to money politics, they will tamper with the voters list, delete names of minority community voters and capture booths. The returning officers will help the BJP. We have seen this in by-polls and municipal corporation elections earlier. Randomly they delete a few names from the voters' list. That is the caution we will have to take. Our booth level leaders should concentrate on the polling stations, go house to house and ensure that votes are cast,” senior state leader Prakash Rathod told this channel.
Polling for the 224 assembly seats in the southern state will take place on May 10, in which the Congress hopes to upstage the ruling BJP. As the Karnataka election is very crucial for the party, preparations for the voting day were reviewed by the senior leaders on Tuesday. Accordingly, all the candidates, the state leaders have been asked to keep a sharp eye on any untoward incident at the polling stations and report it immediately to the party war room.
A team at the AICC level will also keep an eye on the polling process as the stakes are high for the Congress party. Congress veterans said they are hopeful of a comfortable majority, which means more than 113 seats, as preparations for the May 10 polls had been on for years.
“This time, the state unit had started preparing for the elections from 2019, when we lost the JD-S-Congress coalition government to Operation Lotus. The local teams down to the block level were toned up and mobilised for mass contact programmes. We did not let anybody rest. Later, state unit chief DK Shiv Kumar and former chief minister K Siddaramaiah covered all the assembly constituencies as part of the Praja Dhwani yatra,” former Karnataka chief minister M Veerappa Moily told ETV Bharat.
In order to target the BJP over the corruption issue, Congress communications in-charge Jairam Ramesh tweeted a letter from the Contractors Association which expressed over the 40 percent commission being charged on government contracts over the past years. Party insiders said they will report any electoral malpractices to the Election Commission but said they had little hope from the poll panel.
“It is a very unfortunate situation. The EC seems to be tilting at the windmills. We have listed several violations of a level playing field by the PM to the EC over the past few days. The poll panel takes prompt action on a BJP complaint but not on a Congress complaint,” AICC spokesperson Abhishek Many Singhvi said when asked if the party would approach the EC over the PM’s appeal to the voters of Karnataka to support the BJP.
In a counter of sorts, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge urged the voters to vote for the grand old party and elect progress as a result. Kharge also promised that the five guarantees will be passed in the first cabinet meeting. In a show of unity, both Shiv Kumar and Siddaramaiah took the blessings of the Goddess Chamundeshwari and promised to implement the guarantees.
Also read: Karnataka CM visits temple, chants 'Hanuman Chalisa', a day before Assembly polls
