Goyal welcomes EC advisory on restraint in Karnataka polls; hopes Cong respects it

New Delhi: Union minister and senior BJP leader Piyush Goyal on Tuesday welcomed an advisory of the Election Commission (EC), asking political parties and leaders to exercise restraint in their utterances during campaigning for the upcoming Karnataka Assembly polls and hoped that the Congress will respect it.

Talking to reporters here, Goyal said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) welcomes the EC advisory and hopes that the Congress and its leaders will respect it, “though they have never respected any constitutional authority”.

“Be it in India or abroad, they have insulted Parliament, the EC, the courts and the prime minister. They do not spare anyone. We hope that good sense will prevail and they will remember that the people of the country will not tolerate it,” he said.

The poll panel issued an advisory to political parties and their star campaigners on Tuesday, asking them to exercise caution and restraint in their utterances during campaigning in Karnataka and not to vitiate the election atmosphere.

Taking serious note of the “plummeting level of the campaign discourse”, the poll panel referred to instances of “inappropriate vocabulary and language” used by persons during electioneering, “in particular, by those invested with the statutory status of a star campaigner”.

Campaigning for the May 10 polls is hotting up, with the Congress and the BJP engaged in a war of words.

The counting of votes for the Karnataka polls will be taken up on May 13. The Congress is seeking to wrest power from the BJP in the southern state.