Anantkumar Hegde, the Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, has once again sparked a row, after he called the opposition parties ‘crows, monkeys, foxes and donkeys.’ He said this while addressing the crowd in Karwar, Karnataka.
“Our opponents have all come together. Crows, monkeys, bears, foxes and others have all come together. On one side we have a tiger standing, on the other there are monkeys and donkeys. In 2019, you decide who should win, a tiger, or donkeys and monkeys. It is in your hands,” he said.
Responding to this, Karnataka Minister for Water Resources DK Shivakumar sarcastically said, “He comes from God’s race while we all come from monkeys. He is a Union Minister, so how can we comment?”
Former Union Minister and senior congress leader Veerappa Moily meanwhile said, “The tiger has become wild and has to be sent back to the forest.”
This is not the first time that Anantkumar Hegde has found himself embroiled in a controversy. In a speech in Kundapur in November, he had said that the Congress government will soon “celebrate terrorists like Ajmal Kasab and Osama Bin Laden.”
In January, he landed in trouble when he called the people who were protesting against him ‘barking dogs’. The Dalit protesters were expressing their anger over his remarks on changing the Constitution and also his mocking of progressive thinkers.
In an interview he gave in March, he also said that polarising people is real democracy and that it is BJP’s duty to protect Hindu interests.
In 2016, he had reportedly told the reporters that till islam exists in the world, terrorism will also exist. “Islam is a bomb placed to disrupt world peace. As long as there is Islam there will be no peace in the world,” he was quoted as saying.