BENGALURU: BJP state president BS Yeddyurappa said on Tuesday that the state will soon be ‘Congress mukt’ (rid of). He was speaking at a meeting held to recall the Emergency days, in Bengaluru on Tuesday. He said, “During the Emergency, I was in Sagar prison (Shivamogga), from where they shifted me to the Central prison in Ballari. In the prison, the ‘convicts’ and jail staff, who were in-charge of the food distribution, misappropriated the best food for themselves and denied the rightful share to under trial prisoners. Since I couldn’t tolerate the injustice, I began an agitation in prison, but stopped just in the nick of time, otherwise, I wouldn’t be alive today.”
The Opposition leader remembered “the dark days of the Emergency between 1975-1979, when hundreds of opposition members were arrested and incarcerated in prisons by the police, who behaved like demons.” The BJP recalled many from the RSS were incarcerated in prisons during that period. Yeddyurappa said, during that time, Bharat Ratna awardee Jayaprakash Narayan was punished so much in the prison, that he suffered and died. BJP spokesman Go Madhusudan, who spoke on the occasion, said, “I remember the Indian Express group of newspapers was at the centre of the emergency struggle. When every organisation was discouraged, it was the RSS that filled the jails through the Jail Bharo programme. When general elections were declared in 1977, about 90 members were from Jan Sangh background, which is a fore runner of the BJP.’’