By IANS,
Bangalore : Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi late Tuesday urged the people of Karnataka to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the forthcoming assembly polls, saying an unstable government in the past was the reason for the crumbling infrastructure in India’s silicon hub.
Campaigning for the party’s candidates, Modi told a large gathering of people that a decisive vote for the BJP would not only ensure formation of a stable and progressive government, but also decide the future of the country at the national level.
“Though the people of Karnataka voted for the BJP to emerge as the single largest party in the 2004 election, the mandate was not enough to form a government on its own. This time, a decisive vote will enable the party to form the government and be precedence for a similar change at the centre in the next parliamentary election,” Modi said in chaste Hindi that was translated in Kannada by the party’s state unit leader S. Dhanjay Kumar.
He asserted that the BJP would prove poll pundits wrong by securing a clear majority in Karnataka this time, as it did in the December 2007 Gujarat election. He said the Congress was trying to avenge its defeat in his state by threatening the people that his party would turn Karnataka into another Gujarat if voted to power.
“It is regrettable that Congress does not want Karnataka to develop and progress as Gujarat has been doing over the last decade under BJP. By raising the communal bogey and indulging in vote bank politics, the Congress is actually doing disservice to the people of Karnataka.
Referring to the choked roads, traffic snarls and crumbling infrastructure in Bangalore, Modi said a fractured verdict and an unstable government had resulted in urban chaos taking over the garden city due to gross neglect.
“Even a small city like Surat in south Gujarat, which has half the population of Bangalore, boasts of 15km of flyovers and best civic amenities. It is unfortunate a city like Bangalore, which is renowned the world over for its IT and BT (biotechnology) is lagging behind due to apathy,” Modi said.
In a special appeal to the young electorate, Modi said the soft stand of the UPA government against terrorists and appeasing of minorities have led to the spectre of terrorism and Maoism to haunt a peaceful state like Karnataka.
In a veiled attack on the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) for betraying the party by not transferring power as agreed upon in October 2007, Modi cautioned the electorate against voting for such parties, which “indulged in rank opportunism and family politics”.