“Karnataka elections will be a pointer to national politics. If Congress wins in Karnataka, it will strengthen the anti-BJP coalition in the country,” political analyst and former advisor to former Prime Minister late A.B. Vajpayee Sudhindra Kulkarni has said.
Addressing a press conference in Hubballi on Wednesday, he said that the whole country is eagerly awaiting the results of the Karnataka elections and if BJP gets defeated, it will strengthen the opposition parties.
Mr. Kulkarni said that the BJP has completely changed now and there is a need for unseating it in both in the State and at the Centre. “They say development is possible only through double-engine government which is against the very objectives of democracy and the Constitution. In their double-engine government, there is only one driver who controls both the State and the Centre. Whoever may be the Chief Minister here, their remote control will be with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah,” he said.
“Multi-party system is the basis of our democracy. The Constitution says that whichever may be the ruling party, the Union government should work with the State government on the basis of cooperative federalism where there is no partiality. But the BJP’s policy is opposed to it. They need opposition-free India like Communist China,” he said.
To a query, he said that there is a need for the voters to elect a stable government by giving a clear majority to the Congress and thereby, prevent recurrence of Operation Lotus-like situation.
To another query, Mr. Kulkarni said that if the former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was alive and if L.K. Advani was politically active, they would have opposed today’s politics of the BJP. “The late Vajpayee lost power with just one vote. If he had engineered Operation Lotus, he would have saved his government. He did not indulge in immoral politics and as a result, the BJP came to power with a full majority,” he said.
