A day after some BJP leaders invited him to join their party for standing against the controversial Yettinahole river diversion project, senior Congress leader Janaradhana Poojary today said he would be in the Congress till his death.
During a protest against power cuts in the state yesterday, Dakshina Kannada MP Nalin Kumar Kateel had welcomed his stand against the project along with MLC Monappa Bhandary, who openly invited him to join the BJP.
Poojary targeted Bhandary, saying that the invitation showed his 'pettiness' and and there was no question of leaving the Congress, the principles of which he had believed right from childhood.
"I will be in Congress till I die. There is no question of quitting. Indira Gandhi, Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi have played a key role in my political career," he told repoters here.
He said it was the previous BJP government led by Sadananda Gowda who approved the Yettinahole project and former chief ministers B S Yeddyurappa and Jagadish Shettar were involved in it.
Gowda approved the project even before getting a detailed project report (DPR) and BJP had put pressure on the present Chief Minister Siddaramaiah not to discontinue the project.
Poojary reiterated that the project would be harmful to the coastal region and said the environmental impact study was done by Union Ministry of Science and Technology. The project would ultimately lead to water scarcity in Mangaluru and Hassan and adversely affect the coastal regions as a whole, he said.
