HYDERABAD: Kill two birds with one stone; perhaps that’s what was on BJP national president Amit Shah’s mind on Wednesday when he interacted with party’s grassroots-level workers in the city and prepared ground for not just the State Assembly elections, but also for the Lok Sabha polls. He launched a stinging attack on TRS supremo K Chandrasekhar Rao and the bone of contention seemed to be KCR’s friendship with AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi.
Addressing 1,000-odd party workers who had gathered at exhibition grounds, Shah heaped allegations against the pink party. He said KCR’s friendship with AIMIM and Owaisi was a result of votebank politics. “Whose share of reservation will you be eating into to keep your promise of 12 per cent reservations of a minority religious group?” asked Shah, attacking the TRS proposal of providing quota for Muslims. “It’s against the Constitution; moreover, you cannot allocate reservations of more than a total of 50 per cent,” he said.
To boost the morale of his party cadre, Amit Shah cited the example of the Tripura magic that the saffron party had managed to pull off. “Our vote share in the previous elections in Tripura was bad; it was 1.2 per cent in Manipur and 1.5 per cent in Assam,” he said. “Still, the BJP managed to overcome that and win elections in all these three States.
In Telangana our voter base is already at 19 per cent. We are at a much better place in Telangana,” he said, asking his party workers to toil day and night to realise the victory. BJP’s goal, he said, would be left unfinished if headway isn’t made into States like Orissa, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.
In what seemed to be a backhanded compliment to TRS for the State’s growth, Shah said “the battle for Telangana would be based on ideology and not development.” Shah swiftly switched from winning Telangana to how BJP would weed out and deport illegal immigrants from the country.
Categorising them as “infiltrators”, the BJP president said: “Why should the poor of India suffer to uphold someone else’s human rights? Let the elections in these five States be over, each and every infiltrator will be removed from the nation,” he said. He left the cadre behind with a 22-point formula to win the State.