From Our Political Correspondent

BANGALORE, APRIL 5:  GUJARAT Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who has emerged as one of the star campaigners of BJP all over the country, has been roped in to campaign in Karnataka by holding a series of public meetings in five disitricts including Bangalore on April 9.

Modi, who has emerged as the icon and poster-boy for the Hindutva brigade, will be addressing a series of public meetings in Bangalore city, Bijapur, Kittur in Belgaum district, Gadag and Chintamani in Kolar district on April 9, according to state BJP spokesman V Dhananjay Kumar.

Apart from Modi, BJP’s prime ministerial candidate L K Advani and former union minister Arun Shourie will be undertaking electoral campaigns by addressing public meetings in Belgaum, Chitradurga and Tumkur on April 7. Shourie is also slated to address an ``enlightened voters’’ convention at Mangalore on the same day.

BJP national president Rajnath Singh, Hindi filmdom’s ``dream girl’’ of yester-years Hemamalini and former cricketer Navjyot Singh Sidhu have also been scheduled to tour the state, though the dates and venues were yet to be decided.

Dhananjay Kumar predicted that the Congress would taste the "worst-ever" defeat in the state as the party was dogged by infighting. The reluctance of former union minister and senior Congress leader Margaret Alva, who had hit media headlines by alleging ``sale’’ assembly election tickets and was subsequently stripped of her AICC post, to display the photographs of KPCC President R V Deshpande in her posters in the constituency was the most recent example, he said.

Taking exception to Kumaraswamy’s reported description of the veteran Congress leaders, including H C Srikantaiah, who joined BJP as "old oxen fit to be shifted to the slaughter house," he wondered whether the same description applied to the former’s father and JD(S) supremo H D Deve Gowda as he was also in the same age-bracket.