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CMs of 3 Congress-ruled states counter BJP smear campaign
Congress leaders from Telangana, Himachal, and Karnataka counter BJP's claims of betrayal towards women, detailing their implementation of five key guarantees.
MUMBAI: Two chief ministers and a deputy chief minister of three Congress-ruled states—Telangana, Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka—came together to counter the recent BJP ad campaign which claims that the Congress betrayed women in the three states by not implementing the guarantees promised before the polls. Telangana CM Revanth Reddy, Himachal Pradesh CM Sukhvinder Sukhu and Karnataka deputy CM D K Shivakumar individually shared the details of the guarantees given by them, how they were implementing them all and their current status, including the amount spent and the number of beneficiaries. The leaders also alleged that the BJP was running a smear campaign against the Congress in Maharashtra, and challenged the Mahayuti leaders to visit their states to know the reality.
On November 7, a full-page advertisement making the said claims was published in most newspapers in Mumbai. The same day, the Congress leaders filed a complaint with the Election Commission and requested action against the BJP leaders for running the smear campaign.
Elaborating on the details of the five schemes, Shivakumar said that the Congress had announced five guarantees, which it began implementing in 60 days. “We have committed to spend ₹52,000 crore annually on the schemes and are spending between ₹52,000 crore and ₹56,000 crore on them,” said the deputy chief minister.
The five guarantees were a monthly assistance of ₹2,000 to women heads of all families (Gruhalakshmi), 200 units of power to all households (Gruhajyoti), ₹3,000 every month for graduate youths and ₹1,500 for diploma holders (Yuvanidhi), 10 kg of rice per person per month (Annabhagya) and free travel for women in state public transport buses (Shakti).
“What we committed has been delivered,” said Shivakumar, adding that the Congress always fulfilled its promises after coming to power and had never withdrawn guarantees right from the tenure of the country’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. “All the issues that came up during the Rahul Gandhi-led Bharat Jodo Yatra are being resolved one by one,” he emphasised.
Shivakumar said that he wanted the BJP leaders to come and witness the development wrought by the Congress states by personally meeting the beneficiaries. We are ready to make the arrangements right from special aircrafts to buses for them,” he announced.
Reddy said that Telangana had waived loans worth ₹17,869 crore of 22,22,067 farmers, and he was ready to share the list of beneficiaries. “We were ignoring the false claims of the BJP about the Telangana farm loan waiver scheme but when prime minister Narendra Modi started doing the same, I decided to speak out with the details,” he said. “After that, Modi deleted the post on X.”
Since the Karnataka assembly elections, Congress has started using the term ‘guarantees’ instead of poll promises, as this worked in its campaign and the party triumphed over the BJP and came to power. It subsequently used the strategy in the Telangana, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana polls, and won the elections in the first two states. For the Maharashtra assembly elections too, the opposition-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) has announced five ‘guarantees’.
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