The Congress won 135 seats in the 224-member Karnataka Assembly elections on May 10 The Congress won 135 seats in the 224-member Karnataka Assembly elections on May 10 The Congress won 135 seats in the 224-member Karnataka Assembly elections on May 10 Digvijaya Singh, a Congress Rajya Sabha member, said on Sunday that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) should be taught a similar Karnataka-like lesson in Madhya Pradesh, where Assembly elections are due by the end of the year.
The Congress won 135 seats in the 224-member Karnataka Assembly elections on May 10, while the incumbent BJP and former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda's Janata Dal (Secular) won 66 and 19, respectively.
"Through you all, I request the people of our country that the time for a change has come. Ponder over it. The firmness with which the BJP has been defeated in Karnataka, it should be taught a lesson in the same way. They (BJP) are nursing a big ego," Singh said.
According to the Congress leader, the BJP should become humbled. "We are not power hungry but look at the way injustice is being done to the people and how Congressmen are being bullied with false cases. I was the chief minister of MP for 10 years. No BJP activist can say that during my tenure he faced excesses," he said.
Singh claimed that people working under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which offers 100 days of guaranteed wage employment to unskilled rural labourers, were not receiving their wages.
"Panchayati Raj has turned into sarkari raj' . 99 per cent of sarpanchs (village heads) are unhappy and are demanding their powers be restored," he said.
The senior Congress leader added, "We assure that the day the Congress government is formed under the leadership of Kamal Nath, we are going to empower the panchayat system as it was in 2003 (when BJP wrested power from Congress in MP )."
Singh maintained that the Congress has only one mascot in MP, Kamal Nath. "I was the chief minister for 10 years. Let me do other work," Singh said when asked whether he might become the party's face in Assembly polls.
The 2018 MP elections produced a hung Assembly, with the Congress taking the most members (114 in the 230-member House). The BJP got 109 seats.
The Congress created a coalition government under Kamal Nath, but it fell apart in March 2020 when numerous MLAs loyal to Jyotiraditya Scindia escaped and joined the BJP, allowing Shivraj Singh Chouhan to return as chief minister.