Modi plays another caste card in Ghazipur

BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi invoked Lord Krishna on Friday in an apparent bid to make a dent into the Samajwadi Party (SP) supreme Mulayam Singh Yadav’s vote bank to conquer the eastern UP where 18 Lok Sabha seats will go to polls on May 12.

Addressing an election rally in the neighbouring Ghazipur district, Modi spoke about Lord Krishna’s caste. “I come from Dwarka (it is believed that Krishna had established the Yadav kingdom at Dwarka in Gujarat)….I have great respect for the Yaduvansh (yadav clan) traditions,” he said.

“Mulayam treats Yadavs as vote bank…he has not done anything for the community”, Modi said, apparently targeting the sizeable ‘Yadav’ community voters in the eastern Uttar Pradesh region. “We respect the Yadav clan but, for the government of the father-son duo, the Yadavs are nothing more than vote bank,” he said.

Though Modi has, of late, been aggressively wooing the backward castes, it is for the first time he has tried to make a dent into the ‘Yadav’ vote bank of Mulayam. ‘Yadavs’ are the deciding factors on several Lok Sabha seats in the region. Of the 18 Lok Sabha seats going to the polls on May 12, the ‘Yadav’ votes could prove to be crucial in as many as six seats, including Ghazipur and Azamgarh from where Mulayam himself is in the fray.

Earlier, Modi had played the ‘caste card’ to counter the allegation of ‘neechi rajniti’ (low-level politics) against him by the Congress' star campaigner Priyanka Gandhi.

“I have been born in a lower caste....is it a crime?...I have been insulted...an entire caste has been insulted”, Modi had been saying in his meetings in an apparent bid to corner Priyanka and the Congress and woo the backward castes in the region.