Rahul Gandhi raises farm distress issue in Tamil Nadu, but won’t meet Karnataka farmers

BENGALURU: Far away from the scam vs scam battle, Congress vicepresident Rahul Gandhi is scheduled to have a stop-over in Congressruled Karnataka, where about 100 farmers committed suicide since April but he is expected to interact only with his partymen and not farmers.

After addressing a public meeting in Tiruchirapally on Thursday, he spoke to farmers from the Cauvery delta and criticised the state and Centre for implementing policies that hurt farmers. He has also scheduled a padayatra to highlight farmers distress in Ananthapur district of Andhra Pradesh on Friday. Besides farmers, he will address party workers at Puttaparthi, barely three hours away from the Karnataka border. But there is no plan to address farmers even at Ballari. “He is just playing dirty politics. He wants to target opposition-ruled states but not a state ruled by his own party. There is no true concern for farmers,” BJP Karnataka president Prahlad Joshi told ET.

The BJP is likely to take up the farmers’ suicide in Karnataka in Parliament, as part of its scam-for-scam fight against the Congress and opposition parties, Joshi added. BJP will target Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah on both farmers’ suicides and de-notification of land in Bengaluru, a case which the state Lokayukta has dismissed.

The Congress said with the state legislature in session and with BJP’s plans to rake up the suicides issue in Parliament, Gandhi did not want to embarrass the state government by visiting farmers in Karnataka. “Besides, his schedule in the south was fixed a month ago and he does not have time to visit farmers in Karnataka this time,” a party functionary close to Rahul Gandhi told ET.