Bengaluru: Former Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah on Wednesday said the main objective of Congress and its erstwhile alliance partner JDS in the coming assembly byelections is to defeat defectors from the two parties who are now the BJP candidates.
Making it clear that the path of the two parties in achieving the objective was different, he asserted the rebels who were disqualified as Congress and JDS MLAs would be defeated by the people in the elections to be held to the 15 assembly constituencies on December 5.
"Our main objective is defectors will have to lose, because they were responsible for the collapse of the coalition government. We also want to send a message to the state that we will not support defection," the Congress Legislature Party leader told reporters in Mysuru.
Asked if JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy too will support the objective, he said, "whether he supports or not is different, but both our objective is one - defectors, disqualified should be defeated."
On whether the Congress-JDS would go together to defeat the defectors, he said, "the path is not same, it is different..", but did not elaborate.
Recently Kumaraswamy also had said the main strategy of his party, the JD(S), in the bypolls was to defeat the defectors.
Congress and JD(S), who had run a coalition government for 14 months and contested Lok Sabha polls in alliance, have parted ways ever since the collapse of the Kumaraswamy ministry in July following the rebellion by 17 MLAs and are contesting the bypolls independently.
The bypolls were necessitated after the resignation and subsequent disqualification of the 17 legislators by then assembly speaker K R Ramesh Kumar in July after the fall of the Congress-JDS government that paved the way for the BJP tocome to power.
Though the Speaker had disqualified the MLAs till the end of the term of the present assembly in 2023, the Supreme Court had last week allowed them to contest the bypolls following which they had joined the BJP.
With winning majority seats crucial for the government's survival, the BJP has fielded 13 disqualified legislators as party candidates from their respective constituencies.
Siddaramaiah also expressed confidence that the people of the state will defeat the defectors. "I'm confident that people will not tolerate defectors. Already in Maharashtra, Haryana and Gujarat people have defeated most of the defectors. In Karnataka also voters won't tolerate defectors and will defeat them," he said.
Evading a direct answer to a question on whether the BJP government will collapse after the byelections, Siddaramaiah merely said, "What will happen if BJP is unable win the required number of seatsyou tell me."
Siddarmaiah had in the recent past claimed several times that the B S Yediyurappa government may collapse after the bypolls and the state may go for a mid term election.
Hitting out at the BJP, the former chief minister also termed the ruling party as "fascist". "BJP doesn't have culture, no leader in BJP has developed good culture, because BJP is basically a fascist party, they believe in fascism," he alleged.
"They don't believe in natural things, they want to spread lies. One of the characters of fascism is to turn truth into lies and lies into truth and to project it. This is what (German dicator Adolf) Hitler also did," he added.
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