From Our Special Correspondent
Daijiworld Media Network

Bengaluru, May 4: Senior Congress leader and former union home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde has attacked the BJP as being ‘totally anti-Dalit and anti-Adivasi’ and its mindset is responsible for dilution of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Act, 1989.

Addressing a news conference at the KPCC office in Bengaluru on Thursday, he alleged that the last four years of the Narendra Modi government has witnessed an anti–Dalit and anti Adivasi bias like never before, which has led to brazen attack on the Constitution.

“The BJP can never be trusted as its mindset is anti-dalit and anti-adivasi. The dilution of the SC/ST Act was a consequence of the deep rooted prejudice, he said and claimed that it was only the Congress party which was the first party to notice the surreptitious dirty tricks of the BJP in diluting this act and oppose this ill-intentioned dilution,” he said.

However, he said a few BJP MPs had also publicly expressed their unhappiness and had openly voiced their dissent to Modi.

The Congress leader alleged that BJP ruled states accounted for the majority of crime rate against Dalits while Congress ruled Karnataka’s record significantly lesser crimes.

Similarly, BJP ruled Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh record the highest crimes against Adivasis, he said.

On allocation of funds, Shinde said the Union Budget in 2018-19 has allocated only 5.5% for SC’s which form 16.6% of India’s population. The number of SC welfare schemes has been reduced from 294 to just 256.

There was a massive reduction of 91% for government jobs for SC’s, he said.

In 2013, when Congress-led UPA was in power, there were 92,928 jobs for Dalits in Central Government, in 2015 it is reduced to just 8436, the Congress leader claimed.