Let Congress prove its own secular credentials: Deve Gowda

Bengaluru, Dec 26 : Launching a no holds barred attack on the state Congress leaders, former Prime Minister and JD(S) supremo H.D. Deve Gowda on Saturday dared them to come clean on its ‘secular credentials’ rather than asking him to prove his secularism every time.
Addressing a press conference here, Gowda said that he can speak a lot about the Congress with more authenticity than most of the present lot of leaders in the party.
“I started my political career as a Congressman and went on to build my own party after quitting it. Let the Congress stop giving sermons about my secular credentials. Instead, they should see their own chequered past on its stand on secularism,” he said.
Asserting that he never went to anyone’s door asking to make his son Kumaraswamy the Chief Minister after the 2018 Assembly polls, Deve Gowda asked who knocked the doors of the Supreme Court at midnight? The JD(S) chief further asked that who has formed an alliance with the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra? “Has the Congress not entered into an alliance there? Have they not aligned with the Trinamool Congress? I can list several such instances showing how the Congress has been misleading the people about its secular credentials,” he said.
Deve Gowda also said that it was he who invited all the secular leaders of the country for the swearing-in of the Congress-JDS government in Karnataka.