Siddu’s statement on lingayat CMs boomerangs; Cong goes for damage control

Shyam Sundar Vattam | NT

Bengaluru: A statement by the Leader of the Opposition in the State Legislative Assembly Siddaramaiah that the lingayat chief ministers’ are corrupt has created a political storm in the State that too when hardly two weeks are left for the polling of the crucial Assembly election.

This has come as ammunition for the ruling BJP to paint the Congress Party as anti-lingayat at a time when the latter has little upper hand in the surveys conducted till last week. The Congress Party did a similar mistake during the 2018 Assembly polls when the then Chief Minister Siddaramaiah tried to divide lingayats/veerashaivas to get a separate religion status which boomeranged on the grand old party.

The Congress seats, which was 123 plus in 2018, came down to 70, a minus of almost 50 seats for indulging in the most sensitive issue. In the first meeting of the Congress Party, after the debacle in the Assembly polls, KPCC President D.K.Shivakumar apologized to the lingayat/veerashaiva community for the blunder committed by the Congress government and vowed not to think anything on those lines in the future.

Now, Siddaramaiah has stirred the hornet’s nest by terming all the previous lingayat chief ministers as corrupt that too in a public meeting. Now, this issue has snowballed into a major controversy with a couple of seers raising the ante against the Congress party. The issue came in handy for the ruling BJP to attack the Congress party again and again attacking the lingayats/veerashaivas.

Initially, the former CM blamed the BJP Social Media Cell for twisting his statement by cutting and pasting that particular line and claimed that that statement was not the general statement but only against the incumbent CM Basavaraj Bommai. By that time the damage had been done and any amount of clarification didn’t come with the help of the Congress leaders.

The former Congress CM and Varuna candidate tried to downplay it by saying that he had been quoted out of context and blamed the BJP for taking the political mileage of the same. Siddaramaiah said he took the oath as the CM on the Basava Jayanti day in 2018 and made compulsory the display of Basavanna’s portrait in all the government offices in the State.

Without understanding it, the BJP leaders were generalizing his statement only to instigate lingayat/ veerashaiva voters. “I have high regard for the lingayat/ veerashaiva chief ministers who have served the state previously. I was mentioning the corruption of the incumbent CM Bommai and not the entire community”.

While other Congress leaders distanced themselves from Siddaramaiah’s statement, the newly-inducted member and former CM, Jagadish Shettar defended his successor saying that the statement was restricted only to Bommai and nobody else. Meanwhile, the state BJP leaders have decided to make Siddaramaiah’s anti-lingayat statement the poll plank and to mention it in every election rally and public meeting held across the state.