BJP national president Amit Shah steered clear of the Mahadayi dispute, but trained his guns at Chief Minister Siddaramaiah for trying to thwart the party’s Parivarthana Yatra in Mysuru on Thursday by engineering a bandh on the same day.
Mr. Shah, who held the Chief Minister responsible for the bandh coinciding with the rally, accused the Chief Minister of displaying Congress party’s “emergency” mindset to stop rallies and other meetings through “undemocratic” means.
However, the Congress has been claiming that the bandh has been called by Kannada organisations to draw the attention of Central leadership to the inter-State dispute between Karnataka and Goa.
Mr. Shah dared the Congress to stop the saffron party’s “march to power”.
“I have come here to challenge the Chief Minister. You can’t stop the BJP from forming the next government,” Mr. Shah said, while addressing the rally at Maharaja’s College Grounds here.
Accusing the Congress government of sponsoring another Karnataka bandh on February 4, the day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to address a rally in Bengaluru to mark the conclusion of the yatra, Mr. Shah said that he was optimistic that many people from the State would turn up for the event.
