This election isn't about K'taka but India's future: Pitroda

The Karnataka election is a must-win for the Congress as a victory here would set the ball rolling for the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Gandhi family loyalist and technocrat Sam Pitroda said here on Saturday.

Pitroda was in the city to launch the party’s manifesto for Bengaluru region.

“This election is not about Karnataka. It’s about the future of India. I’m convinced that we will win and when we win, it will set the ball rolling for the 2019 election. It’s very important for us to win this election,” said Pitroda, who is known as the father of India’s telecom revolution in the 1980s. He served as advisor to former prime ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh and led many technology projects.

He urged party workers to counter lies and misinformation. “Lies sell very well during elections. I remember Rajiv Gandhi’s election when Bofors was a lie, which sold. In the 2014 election, people kept saying 100,000 crore got lost in 2G licence. It was a lie. We need to be careful on how lies propagate, especially on social media.”

Pitroda said those spreading lies had no idea on what the Congress had done for Bengaluru. “I started coming to Bengaluru in the 1980s when we took our first office for C.DAC. Bengaluru had the infrastructure for intellectual capacity. That was laid by the Congress,” he said, citing examples of ISRO, ITI, IISc, IIM, DRDO, HAL, BEL, Infosys, Wipro and TCS.

Among other things, the Congress has promised a special package of Rs 1 lakh crore to create world-class infrastructure and make Bengaluru eligible for consideration as India’s second capital, an idea Industries Minister R V Deshpande floated earlier this year.

He said the key to this elections was booth management. “Do we take messages to people at the booth-level? Do we carry people with us to vote for the Congress? That will be the challenge in every election going forward,” he said. “My message to party workers: Don’t take things lightly. Until we have won, we haven’t won.”