Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah has asked Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to stop persecuting Ayyappa devotees in the State.
“If you don’t stop harassing them, the BJP will wipe your party out of the State,” Mr. Shah said while addressing a public meeting here on Friday.
Mr. Shah accused the Chief Minister of deploying 1,500 Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) activists in police uniform to hound Ayyappa devotees reaching Sabarimala. “The CPI(M) is destroying the State’s culture,” he said.
The BJP leader challenged Mr. Vijayan to implement all Supreme Court rulings. “Have you dared to implement the Supreme Court ruling banning loudspeakers in masjids? In the name of Supreme Court ruling, the communists have wounded the believers in the State,” he said.
Mr. Shah said that 2,000 Ayyappa devotees were in jail, and false charges were being slapped on more than 30,000 devotees. “The communists have cheated the people on the Sabarimala issue. And Kerala will not forget it,” he said.
He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had given Kerala four times more than what the Congress-led government had given during its last term. He listed out a big contribution made by the NDA government to the State totalling ₹1,98,155 crore in the last five years, which included ₹3,000 crore for the Kochi Smart City, ₹1,000 crore for IIT, Palakkad, and ₹1,162 for the Amritanagaram project.
Mr. Shah accused the Chief Minister of trying to scuttle many Central government projects from being implemented in the State. “Mr. Vijayan tried to scuttle Mr. Modi’s projects such as the AIIMS, Palakkad IIT, Kanjikode rail factory and national highway expansion,” he said.
The BJP leader said that Mr. Vijayan was afraid of Mr. Modi. “He is playing politics in the development of Kerala. We want to give ₹6,000 a month to small farmers. Mr. Vijayan has never given us the list of farmers to forward that money,” Mr. Shah said.
He said if Mr. Modi was re-elected Prime Minister, there would be two or three Malayalam-speaking MPs with him in the Cabinet. BJP State president P.S. Sreedharan Pillai presided over the meeting.
