Bail out weavers, says BJP

Hyderabad: The Bharatiya Janata Party national president, Nitin Gadkari on Friday assured weavers of a special package to bail them out from a web of miseries once his party comes back to power.

Addressing a huge gathering of party workers and supporters at Dharna Chowk at the culmination of the three-day hunger strike by BJP national secretary P Muralidhar Rao on the plight of the weavers, Mr Gadkari said the BJP was for waiver of the debts of weavers and free supply of power to handloom workers.

This would materialise only if the party is voted back to power, he said and added the weaver community is left in the lurch and it needs all possible support. The handloom workers were extended a fair deal of support only during the NDA rule.

The BJP national president came down heavily on the UPA government for worsening the condition of weavers, farmers and tribal communities. The wretched conditions they were languishing is owed mainly to the economic policies of the UPA, Mr Gadkari said.

Stating that the handloom workers should be given due importance in the implementation of welfare measures, he said both sericulture as well as the handloom sector should be given the much needed fillip through effective marketing measures.

The handloom sector received a major blow because of a drop in exports while imports were flooding the domestic markets, leaving little margins for the handloom workers who were desperate to eke out a bare living.

Taking a dig at the UPA government for its bid to redefine poverty by putting all those earning more than Rs 32 a day above the BPL bar, he said it would affect even the weavers and the farm workers.

Mr Gadkari said that the party leaders, who were genuinely with the people, would merit consideration for the party tickets during the next elections. The party had a separate machinery to make out who all were in the midst of the people fighting for their cause and who were not.

The BJP leader was all praise for Muralidhar Rao for his attempt to draw attention at the national level to the plight of the weaver community through his protest. He wanted the initiative to continue further in the State until the conditions in which the weavers were living is improved at least a bit.

Mr Muralidhar Rao ended his fast with a glass of fruit juice offered by some handloom workers in the presence of Jaya Jaitly, MP Balbir Punj, Purushottam Bhupala, Nirmala Sitaraman and Tumbi Radha Krishnan, and others.

Earlier, the State BJP president Kishan Reddy made a scathing attack on the Chief Minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy saying that he knew the least about the issues of the weavers and hence subjected them to neglect. 

Muralidhar Rao

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