K’taka bypolls: Cong leading in all 3 segments, Kumaraswamy’s son trails by 18,029 votes
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) which was leading in all three Assembly segments early on has suffered a setback.
The Bharatiya Rashtra Samithi (BRS) has alleged that the Rs 42 crore cash recovered by the Income Tax Department in a raid at the flat of a former woman corporator in Bengaluru was actually meant to fund the election campaign of the Congress in Telangana.
BRS leader and state Finance Minister T Harish Rao said here on Friday that the Congress’s aim was to pump in Rs 1,500 crore commissions collected from builders, and gold merchants in Bengaluru ahead of the assembly elections in Telangana.
The ill-gotten money, according to the BRS, will be distributed among voters in Telangana.
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During an IT raid at a flat belonging to contractor Ambikapathy, whose wife is a corporator, boxes containing about Rs 500 denomination notes worth Rs 42 crore were found under the bed. The couple was close to a former Congress MLA, said Harish Rao alleging that the “40 per cent commission government was now 50 per cent commission government”.
BRS working president KT Rama Rao made similar allegations against the Congress. “The intellectually bankrupt Congress and its leadership is pumping in hundreds of crores of rupees from Karnataka to purchase votes in Telangana,” said Rao, adding that PCC chief A Revanth Reddy, who had been caught red-handed in the note-for-vote scam in 2015 while in TDP, is now leading the Congress party in Telangana and hence this was all expected.
While the BRS accused the Telangana Congress of getting election funding from Karnataka, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that the BRS had helped the Congress in a big way by funding the elections in Karnataka and the Congress was now returning the favour by splitting the anti-incumbency vote in Telangana.
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