Sushma unhappy with BJP for ignoring women

Even as BJP grappled to put down unrest among its ranks over allocation of tickets to contest for the Assembly polls in Karnataka, senior leader Sushma Swaraj joined the fray by expressing unhappiness over the party granting less number of tickets to women.

"I am not happy with this number of three women selected so far. I have already expressed this before the central election committee. Now they say tickets will be granted to at least 15 women candidates' Sushma told reporters before leaving for Mysore to attend the party's women rally. She however, played down the protests from local party men over the distribution of tickets by describing them as minor incidents.

"This is an aberration and not unnatural in a party which is tipped to form the government," she said. She also dismissed the allegations of party tickets being sold as "baseless" and a campaign by its adversaries. "I dismiss the allegation as baseless. It is coming only from our adversaries and not by our partymen," she said.

Sushma said the party will also raise issue of price rise and spread of terrorism into the corridors of south would be the main issues her party will take up in the coming elections.

She appealed the electorate not to give half-hearted mandate as they did in last election and install the BJP Government with full majority.

She said the party would showcase the performance state party leader B S Yeddyurappa when he was the Chief Minister and Finance Minister in JDS-BJP government. BJP National General Secretary H N Ananthkumar said the seat sharing talks with JDU was progressing well and hoped that it will soon be finalised.

Meanwhile, the BJP today also said it would grant a subsidy of Rs 2 per litre of milk supplied to the dairies if it was voted to power in the May assembly election.

"To help farmers producing milk, we will extend Rs two as subsidy per litre of milk if voted to power," B S Yeddyurappa announced at a press conference here.

The poll announcement came close on the heels of the party promising free power supply to irrigation pumpsets to woo farmers.

Ahead of the release of BJP's poll manifesto, expected this week, Yeddyurappa said his party would create a revolving fund with a Rs 500 crore corpus for a market intervention scheme to benefit farmers.

Yeddyurappa also slammed JD-S for eyeing a verdict for hung assembly, and charged his former coalition partner of encouraging political instability in the state. He appealed to the electorate to vote for a single party rule and help BJP make Karnataka a "model" state.