Yogendra lauds CSOs' role in defeating BJP in polls

Maqsood Maniyar I NT

Bengaluru: Swaraj India founder Yogendra Yadav on Friday sought to congratulate civil society organisations (CSOs) members for playing a pivotal role in ensuring the BJP’s loss in the recently concluded Assembly elections.

Although civil society taking sides in electoral battles was seen as imprudent, they took a call to save the constitution, he reasoned. He made the comments at a Yeddelu Karnataka (YK) function to honour poll volunteers in Bengaluru on Friday.

“Earlier, we used to say all parties are the same, they’re thieves and when the results came out we used to say such a shame, this is the worst outcome. We used to go to certain parties and say please include these suggestions of ours in your manifesto. They usually replied that’s all fine but what will you do for us? We decided to change all that and intervened because people realized it’s not a normal election,” he said.

Numbers back us:

Yogendra Yadav Yadav, himself a psephologist, insisted that civil society participation had boosted Congress’ fortunes and produced numbers to prove the same. He pointed out that YK volunteers had covered 102 constituencies and the breakdown for the same in the 2018 Assembly elections had been 60 seats to the BJP, 31 to Congress and the rest to JD(S).

Meanwhile, the breakdown for the same in the 2023 polls was the reverse with Congress bagging 62 seats and BJP making do with 31. “There had been a nearly five per cent swing in favour of Congress from last time but where we volunteered there was 7.5 per cent swing. Moreover, where our A team volunteered, there was 9.4 per cent swing,” Yogendra said.

‘New Parl building, no constitutional values’

The for mer AAP leader also slammed the inauguration of the new parliament Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar’s birthday as being deliberate. He regarded it as a ‘Bhavan’ (building) lacking Bhavana’ (constitutional sentiment). “The Sengol or scepter should not be passed on to any ruler but rather it belongs with the people,” Yadav said.