The Himachal Pradesh unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party on Sunday joined the partys national campaign to oppose the Direct Tax Code Bill 2010 to come up in Parliament during the Budget Session. The BJP has said the Bill had brought the cooperative sector in country into a desperate situation and it would also have harmful effects on the poor and the farmers.

Talking to the media here on Sunday, national convenor of the BJP Central Cooperative Cell Dhananjay Kumar Singh said the Bill was a concerted bid by the big business houses in India and multinational companies to target the rural framers and the poor since 75 per cent of them counted under the cooperative sector lived in villages and were unorganised.

Earlier, he also held a meeting on the issue with state leaders at the party office in Shimla.

He pointed out that this would strangulate the cooperative societies and completely destroy the rural economy. Even nationalised banks are unable to reach out to the poor with their micro-finance schemes, resulting in desperate farmers committing suicides. The void left by nationalised banks will never be filled by MNCs, he told the media.

The BJP asked people associated with cooperative societies to join a mass protest rally at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on March 7.

The party has said that in another bid to disturb the cooperative sector, the Central government has sought to bring the Mutli State Cooperative Societies Act Amendment Bill. The law will allow the registrars of Central and state governments to interfere in the administration of such societies and needs to be opposed tooth and nail, he said.