Karnataka Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy came out strongly against the BJP over Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s comments on the law and order situation in the state.
“The BJP is misleading people regarding the death of the Hindu activist. The BJP has no moral right to tell us about law and order. During Narendra Modi’s rule, the Gujarat Lokayukta was headless for 10 years,” Reddy said.
Singh on Sunday had accused the Congress-led Karnataka government of dividing the state across communal lines in the recent incident of the mysterious death of 19-year-old Hindu activist Paresh Mesta in coastal Karnataka.
The union minister had also criticised the law and order situation citing instances such as the mysterious death of DySP Ganapathy.
Quoting National Crime Records Bureau records, Reddy said that BJP-ruled states reported far more instances of crime while Karnataka was in the sixth place.
Reddy added, “The union minister is not aware about the attack on pub-goers by members of the BJP in Mangaluru.”
In his address on Sunday, Rajnath Singh had also promised that if the BJP formed the government in the coming elections (May 2018), it would nab the killers of noted journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh.
To this, Reddy said, “The state government has already constituted a SIT to investigate the murder (Gauri’s). Why has he not given a reply on the investigation into the murder of Dabholkar?”
Noted rationalist Narendra Dabholkar was murdered by unidentified gunmen on August 20, 2013 in Kohlapur. In similar instances, Left leader Govind Pansare, and scholar and rationalist MM Kalburgi were killed in 2015 in Pune and Dharwad respectively.
Gauri was shot dead on September 5 outside her Bengaluru residence. Even after three and a half months since the murder there has been no breakthrough in the investigation.
All these murders had a striking similarity in the manner of killing and in the use of country-made pistols. According to activists, all these murders were carried out by right-wing Hindu groups close to the RSS-BJP.
So far none of the murder cases have reached a legal conclusion.
The CBI had arrested one Hindu activist belonging to Goa-based Sanatan Sanstha in connection with Dabholkar’s murder while another person arrested in connection with Pansare’s murder is out on bail.