Belagavi border row | Effigies of Shinde, Fadnavis burnt

Bengaluru: In a tit for tat, the Karnataka Rakshna Vedika, a fringe group, on Sunday burnt the effigies of Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and his deputy Devendra Fadnavis in the border district of Belagavi.

They were protesting against the burning of effigies of Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai in Maharashtra and defacing interstate Karnataka road transport buses.

The protesters also attacked goods vehicles coming from Maharashtra and defacing the number plates.

This was in retaliation to an incident when an unidentified person threw a stone and broke the windowpane of one Karnataka state bus in Sangli district. At Daund tehsil in Pune, members of the Maratha Mahasangh members threw black ink on a Nipani-Aurangabad bus of Karnataka transport.

The Vedika activists told the media they will not tolerate any form of attack on Karnataka buses or efforts to deface them. “We will not keep quiet if Kannadigas are insulted or if Maharashtra stakes claim on villages near the border,” they said.

The police used mild force to disperse the activists.

With aggressive reactions from activists of both the states and state transport buses becoming a soft target of the political outfits, interstate transport services have been badly affected.

Passengers who need to travel across the state border are facing inconvenience due to the unavailability of buses.