Cong sees red as another rowdy Shankar joins BJP

NT Correspondent

Mysuru / Bengaluru: The Congress continued to rail against the BJP’s induction of history sheeters into the party even as the notorious Bettanagere Shankar joined the saffron party in Mysuru district on Saturday in the presence of none other than BJP MP Pratap Simha.

Shankar is said to be the BJP’s Zilla Panchayat ticket hopeful in HD Kote in Mysuru district. Interestingly, the notorious Bengaluru rowdy sheeter called himself Nalluru Shankaregowda at the event, perhaps to rebrand himself or simply throw the media and BJP’s political rivals off the scent, but to no avail.

All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary and the party’s Karnataka in-charge Randeep Singh Surjewala came down heavily on the latest induction by the BJP. “There is no place for intellectuals in the BJP. However, they value corrupt people who accept bribes and of course, rowdies,” he said.

He went so far as to see a conspiracy in BJP collecting voter data, deleting names from electoral lists and following that up by inducting rowdies into the party, seeing it as an intimidation tactic. “They have already removed names from voters’ list. Now, they are building http://BJPRowdyMorcha.com to scare voters. Isn’t that the case @BSBommai?” he asked. “Is murder a prerequisite to join your ‘sanskrutik’ (traditionalist) party,” Surjewala wondered.

Shankar has been wooing BJP bigwigs for some time now. When State Revenue Minister R Ashok visited HD Kote, the history sheeter had welcomed the minister with banners bearing images of both him and Ashoka. Simha was left in an awkward position and had to answer mediapersons on the issue on Saturday.

He had claimed he didn’t Shankar had been a rowdy. “Hundreds, if not thousands of people join the party in one go sometimes. I can’t verify everyone’s background and what they had been in an earlier life or what they are doing and what they plan on doing in the future. I’m not going to scrutinize everyone like a job recruiter,” he said.

MP Tejasvi Surya, MLAs PC Mohan and Uday Garudachar had faced a lot of flak for sharing the stage with history sheeter ‘Silent’ Sunil recently. The BJP had also accepted rowdy Mallikarjun aka ‘Fighter’ Ravi into the party. Another rowdy sheeter Manjunath alias Uppi was nominated to the Anekal Town Municipal Council by the BJP on Friday