Gandhinagar: Main opposition Congress party in Karnataka has now a problem with Gujarat-headquartered dairy giant Amul.

On Wednesday, Amul had tweeted that a wave of freshness in coming to Bengaluru from Kengeri to Whitefield — from the west end of the city to the east — with the hashtag “LaunchAlert.” The cooperative said in a following tweet that quick commerce platforms will be used to facilitate milk and curd delivery.

On Friday, Congress leader and former Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah said “all Kannadigas should pledge not to buy Amul products”. His statement followed speculations of a merger between the Karnataka Milk Federation (KMF) and Gujarat’s Anand Milk Union Limited (Amul).

“All Kannadigas have to unanimously resist the usurpation of the KMF, which has been built for the welfare of the farmers of the country. All Kannadigas should pledge not to buy Amul products”, Siddaramaiah said.

He added, “In addition to language treason by the imposition of Hindi and land treason by trespassing within the state borders, now the BJP government is going to betray the farmers by shutting down Karnataka Milk Federation (KMF), which is the livelihood of millions of dairy farming families in the country.”

Siddaramaiah also called on Chief Minister Basavaraja Bommai to immediately intervene in the matter and stop Amul from “entering (the state’s dairy market) through the back door.”

In connection with this ongoing row, the Bruhat Bengaluru Hotels Association has decided to use only Nandini milk to “support the state’s (dairy) farmers”.

In a statement, the Bruhat Bengaluru Hotels Association, without naming Amul, said Kannadigas should only promote Nandini milk products.

“We are all proud of Karnataka’s Nandini milk produced by our farmers and it should be encouraged. In our city, clean and delicious coffee stands as the backbone of snacks. And we encourage it with great pride. It is being heard that milk from other states is being shipped to Karnataka recently. We are all Nandini,” read a statement from Bruhat Bengaluru Hotels Association.
Earlier, the Congress accused the BJP of hatching a conspiracy to kill the state’s formidable dairy brand, Nandini.

In January this year, Congress leader DK Shivkumar had said – we don’t need Gujarat model in Karnataka.

“Recently, when Amit Shah came to Karnataka, he talked about Amul and Nandini, we don’t need Amul technology, our brand
Nandini is the best, it’s better to make Karnataka model, we don’t need Gujarat model in Karnataka,” he had said

Shivkumar was reacting to union Cooperation minister Amit Shah’s suggestion in Bengaluru that Amul and Nandini, two successful milk unions, could work towards the welfare of the country’s milk producers, initiating a “white revolution”.

Later the State cooperation minister S T Somashekar had to clarify that the statement did not mean a merger of the two milk cooperatives — Karnataka Milk Federation (KMF) and Gujarat-based Anand Milk Union Ltd (AMUL). Karnataka chief minister Basavaraj Bommai had also defended Shah and said that Nandini Dairy will always maintain its separate identity in the coming years. Bommai had then told reporters here that the merger of Nandini into AMUL is a wrong imagination.