Taking a veiled dig at Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Congress veteran B K Hariprasad on Sunday appealed to the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee president D K Shivakumar, to provide “equal opportunities” to all communities while filling political vacancies to boards and corporations.
Participating in the birth anniversaries of late prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, and late chief minister Devaraj Urs in the Congress party office here, Hariprasad said that the workers of all communities have worked hard for the party to come to power in the state and their efforts must be recognised and rewarded too.
“I strongly appeal to Shivakumar to take care of the party workers’ interests. Party workers should not feel that they have been left out and that some particular community is allowed to dominate,” he said.
“Ours is a party that believes in principles of representative democracy and not majoritarian views of any group. Party should not become a victim of such allegations. If such feelings start creeping in the minds of our workers, then our party will lose them forever. Therefore, loyal workers must be rewarded even if they belong to very small microscopic communities,” he said.
He also appealed to Shivakumar to take steps to re-introduce elections in colleges and universities. “Lot of youngsters in our time came from college politics. After imposing a ban on elections, we have lost the opportunity of identifying and nursing many young politicians. Therefore, party must take steps to introduce election system in colleges again,” he noted.
Reacting to this, Shivakumar said that former AICC president Rahul Gandhi had already instructed him not to ignore party workers while making appointments to boards and corporations.
“We will take care of all our workers. We will fill all vacancies based on the proportion of various castes in the state,” he said.
Published 20 August 2023, 22:18 IST