Launching a diatribe against Congress, Union Minister Shobha Karandlaje, the operational head of the BJP’s election campaign, demanded the Congress to clarify its relationship with the banned Popular Front of India (PFI) and its political arm Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI).
Karandalje’s offensive came a day after the SDPI’s national general secretary Elyas Mohammad Thumbe claimed that his party had an ‘understanding’ with the Congress during the 2018 Assembly election.
Addressing her maiden press conference after being appointed as the BJP’s election management committee convenor, Karandlaje used the nationalism and Hindutva plank to attack Congress.
She said that the SDPI’s admission proved ‘yet again’ that the Congress always backed ‘traitors, foreigners and terrorists’ in the country. “BJP was saying this for the last several years that the SDPI and the Congress are two faces of the same coin, but none believed it. Now it has come out in the open,” she said.
The Udupi-Chikmagalur MP alleged that the PFI was responsible for killing hundreds of Hindu youths in the Coastal Karnataka region. “BJP under PM Modi banned PFI but the Congress in the past has taken steps to release PFI goons freely, this is the difference between party which only worries about its vote bank and worries about national security (BJP),” she explained.
She alleged further that the BJP worker Praveen Nettaru was hacked to death by unidentified assailants last year and BJP alleged that this was handiwork of PFI killer squads but the Congress went publicly defending that this was not PFI’s work and similarly, cooker blast case too was defended by the Congress saying it was not act of terrorism.
“The NIA investigations on both of these cases have also exposed the Congress’ lies,” she said.