The Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party staged a demonstration against the Congress government near the State Secretariat in Jaipur on Tuesday.
The protesters were forced to abandon their plan of laying siege to the Secretariat building after the police resorted to a mild lathicharge and used water cannons to stop them.
BJP State unit president C.P. Joshi and senior party MPs and MLAs led the protest after a meeting at the party headquarters here and sat on a dharna at Statue Circle. While the BJP leaders courted arrest after the protest, about a dozen party workers sustained injuries in a scuffle with the policemen and were shifted to the trauma centre of a government hospital.
The protest was organised as part of the BJP’s ‘Nahi Sahega Rajasthan’ (Rajasthan will not tolerate) campaign in the run-up to this year’s State Assembly election. A large number of party workers from across the State arrived in Jaipur here to take part in the protest.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi endorsed the BJP’s ‘Chalo Jaipur’ slogan and posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the Congress government had turned Rajasthan into a “quagmire of misery and infamy” and the people wanted to get rid of it. “The people’s resolve to uproot the misrule in the State will get a big boost from this campaign of the BJP,” Mr. Modi posted.
Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Rajya Sabha MP Kirodi Lal Meena, Lok Sabha MP Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, party’s national general secretary Arun Singh, Leader of Opposition in State Assembly Rajendra Rathore and Deputy Leader of Opposition Satish Poonia, were among the leaders who took part in the protest.
In their address to the party workers, the leaders accused the ruling Congress of indulging in “politics of appeasement” and failing to control crimes against women. They cited atrocities against Dalits, incidents of rape, corruption, farmers’ suicides and unemployment as an evidence of all-round failure of the State government.
Reacting to the demonstration, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot said leaders at the Centre and in the State were making false allegations to divert attention from the failures in Manipur and other BJP-ruled States. “The BJP is humiliating the people of Rajasthan by defaming them. The people will not tolerate it and will respond when the time comes,” Mr. Gehlot posted on X.
