The Congress has lodged a police complaint against Union home minister Amit Shah for allegedly telling election rallies that Karnataka would witness communal riots and a lifting of the ban on the Popular Front of India if the Congress returns to power.

State Congress president D.K. Shivakumar, national general secretary Randeep Singh Surjewala and senior leader G. Parameshwar lodged the complaint at the High Grounds police station on Thursday accusing Shah of promoting enmity and hatred.

“More worryingly, coming from the Union home minister himself, was the statement that if the Indian National Congress wins the upcoming elections, then the entire state of Karnataka will be ‘afflicted with communal riots’,” the written complaint says.

Shah had made the alleged statement at an election rally in Terdal, Bagalkot.

According to the complaint, a speech that Shah made in Bijapur “was shockingly riddled with flagrantly false statements aimed at tarnishing the image of Indian National Congress by levelling false and unfounded allegations, with a clear objective of trying to create an atmosphere of communal disharmony amongst the gathered crowd and the individuals viewing it on other media platforms”.

The complainants provided a hyperlink to the speech, which was available on YouTube on Thursday afternoon. In it, Shah purportedly warns the people of Karnataka that a Congress government would lift the ban on the PFI.

Shah also purportedly claims in the speech that the Congress would reinstate the 4 per cent reservation for Muslims (within the OBC quota), which Karnataka’s BJP government scrapped last month.

In the complaint, the Congress has said that Shah’s statements “are designed to incite any class or community of persons to commit any offence against any other class or community, and are thereby punishable under Section 505 of the IPC and other provisions of the IPC”.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Wednesday tweeted: “This is a brazenly intimidatory statement. The Union Home Minister having allegiance to an organisation banned by India’s very first Home Minister is now issuing threats during an election campaign when staring at certain defeat.”

The reference was to the ban on the RSS — the parent organisation of the BJP — after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, when the country’s home minister was Vallabhbhai Patel, a Congress stalwart whose legacy the BJP has been trying to appropriate.