CM meets party chief, says he has full state support.
With rising pressure on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership to act on the controversies surrounding B S Yeddyurappa, chief minister of Karnataka, national party president Nitin Gadkari has been authorised to take a decision.
In a morning meeting today, where all the core group members were present, leaders expressed their views and asked Gadkari to decide on the CM’s future.
“All the senior leaders expressed their views in the meeting and then authorised me... But I will again like to discuss all the issues with Yeddyurappa before taking a decision,” said Gadkari.
Party sources said Yeddyurappa would come to Delhi — his decision, he wasn’t asked to — and meet Gadkari this evening. He was coming, sources said, to drive home the point that he was in control in the state and a decision to remove him from the top job might affect the party dearly in the panchayat and taluk elections scheduled in another month.
The CM is under the scanner because he had allegedly allotted government land to his kin. While a judicial probe had been ordered and Yeddyurappa’s family members have returned the land, opposition parties in Karnataka are demanding his resignation.
A section of senior leaders believe he should resign, since if he remains in power, the BJP would be handicapped in making an all-out attack on the government in Parliament on the issues of corruption in 2G spectrum allocation, the Adarsh housing society scandal and the Commonwealth Games controversies.
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Yeddyurappa said he had no intention of resigning. “I am going to meet Nitin Gadkari in the evening. I have the support of 110-120 MLAs (in a legislature of 224) and not 10 or 20 or 40 people. I will apprise him of the situation in Karnataka,” he said in Bangalore.
It is the second meeting between Gadkari and Yeddyurappa in three days. He had, with state BJP chief K S Eswarappa, rural development minister Jagadish Shettar and ex-state chief Sadananda Gowda, met Gadkari and leaders Arun Jaitley and Ananth Kumar to discuss the developments.