Seven MLAs return; opposition fishing in troubled waters
The political scene in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Karnataka took a curious turn on Thursday with senior party leaders flying down from Delhi to broker peace. Central leaders like M Venkaiah Naidu and Anantakumar have arrived in the state capital to broker peace between chief minister B S Yeddyurappa and the 14 dissident legislators.
National party president Nitin Gadkari held telephonic conversations with the rebels to mollify them.
At the same time, leaders of opposition parties, Congress and JD(S), are busy chalking out strategies to retain MLAs.
Presently, the legislature party meeting of the ruling BJP is on at a resort outside the city while the Congress has sent all its MLAs to Pune. Efforts to pacify the dissident leaders intensified with state ministers Janardhan Reddy and B Sriramulu holding parleys with various factions at a star hotel in Goa where the rebels are camping.
Even as BJP’s central leadership pitched in to broker a peace, chief minister B S Yeddyurappa shunted out two more ministers from the ministry this morning. The dropped ministers are Anand Asnotikar and Balachandra Jarkiholi. Both of them are among the 19 legislators who withdrew support from the government on Wednesday.
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Meanwhile, the damage control exercise launched by the BJP has yielded encouraging results with the return of two dissident legislators into the party fold. However, unconfirmed sources said that as many as seven MLAs have come back into the party fold. “Two of the 14 BJP legislators, who had withdrawn support to the state government have retracted from their stand they had taken earlier when the letters were sent to the Governor with their signatures,” a party spokesman said.
Dodanagowda G Patil and Bellubi Sangappa Kalappa are back in Bangalore and holding discussions with senior party leaders, he said. It is expected that five more legislators are likely to return to the party fold by this evening.
Nineteen MLAs — 14 BJP and five independent legislators - had submitted let-ters to Governor H R Bharadwaj seeking withdrawal of their support to the first BJP government in South India. BJP was reduced to 103 members supporting it after the mutiny, from its tally of 117 in the Assembly. It expects to woo party’s dissident legislators, to attain a figure of 113 for a majority in the Assembly.
The chief minister, who had gone to Kerala to offer special puja to goddess Raja Rajeshwari in Kannur has returned to Bangalore and is presently participating at the legislature party meeting. He plans to move a confidence motion in the Assembly to prove majority on October 11, a day before the deadline set by Governor H R Bharadwaj.
As of now, 12 rebel BJP MLAs and five Independents from Karnataka landed in Goa after brief halts in Chennai, Kochi and Mumbai since they left Bangalore yesterday after withdrawing support to the Yeddyurappa government. The dissident legislators flew in here today from Mumbai and were taken to an undisclosed location, sources said.
BJP state president K S Eshwarappa expressed confidence that the party would secure the majority in the no-confidence motion on October 11. At the same time, he did not see the current rebellion as any kind of dissidence but some disagreement of dissatisfied MLAs and ministers.
The BJP president admitted that as the party went about broadbasing its reach, there were bound to be such problems.
“We will see that right kind of people are elected in the next elections,” he told a press conference.