All India Congress Committee general secretary Digvijay Singh on Tuesday claimed that the so-called Modi wave was on the wane, as was evident in the byelection results in the State.
At a press conference here after chairing a meeting of the Congress Coordination Committee, Mr. Singh said, “I would like to thank the electorate ... where the byelections were held, because there has been a substantial jump in the voting for the Congress in these elections.”
That the so-called Modi wave was all-pervasive throughout the country stood exposed because the Bharatiya Janata Party had not gained in any of the segments where the byelections were held. The BJP had lost seats which it held earlier, Mr. Singh said. The Congress has bagged two seats in the State in the byelections — Bellary (ST) and Chikkodi–Sadalga, while the BJP has retained the Shikaripur seat.
Cabinet reshuffleThough Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has categorically ruled out a Cabinet reshuffle, a section of the legislators at the party’s coordination committee meeting petitioned Mr. Singh demanding a reshuffle to induct fresh faces and dropping “non-performing” Ministers.
The last Cabinet expansion took place on January 1, 2014, when R. Roshan Baig and D.K. Shivakumar were sworn in.
Mr. Singh said an exercise to appoint legislators and party leaders as chairpersons for various government-owned boards and corporations was expected to be completed soon.
Local body pollsWith elections to the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike council and local bodies to be held in less than a year, the committee discussed a strategy on holding mass contact programmes at the grassroots-level to inform the people about government welfare programmes.
At the press conference, Mr. Singh took a swipe at the BJP for using the “love-jihad” controversy for communalising the society in Uttar Pradesh.
He condemned the BJP for using the alleged gang-rape of a Hindu woman in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh to give a communal edge. He said a private TV channel reviewed police data involving 37 cases of “love-jihad” in Meerut district from January to August this year, and only seven of them involved Hindu girls and Muslims boys. In all the remaining cases, the accused were from the Hindu community. Of the total number of accused, 58 were Hindus and 13 Muslims, Mr. Singh said.