Guarantees will swing 10-15% votes for Congress, says Sorake

Bengaluru: The flagship guarantee schemes in Karnataka are expected to "divert" 10-15% votes from the BJP towards Congress, the party’s campaign committee chairperson Vinay Kumar Sorake said on Friday.

Sorake said this at a party event to mark him becoming the Karnataka Congress campaign committee chairperson. 

"As per the information we have received, the guarantee schemes will divert 10-15% votes from BJP towards us. There's a good opportunity for us to ensure a never-seen-before result in this election," Sorake, a former minister, said. 

Sorake said the guarantee schemes were ridiculed by many as being unwieldy. "But we rolled out the schemes in just six months. On one single day, we declared 1.10 crore women as yajamani (head of the household) and empowered them economically," he said. 

The Congress leader also spoke of an internal report that suggests the BJP's difficulty in Karnataka in the upcoming Lok Sabha election. "Someone told me that an intelligence report given to Prime Minister Narendra Modi says the BJP is finding it difficult to win even 10 seats in Karnataka," he said.

The event also saw the inauguration of Tanveer Sait, G C Chandrashekhar, Vinay Kulkarni, Manjunath Bhandary and Vasanth Kumar as the new working presidents of the Karnataka Congress.