BS Yeddyurappa comes out from Nitin Gadkari’s home in New Delhi on Wednesday. Picture by Prem Singh

New Delhi, Nov. 24: B.S. Yeddyurappa’s throne is safe, and it’s straight from the boss’s mouth.

BJP president Nitin Gadkari today formally announced that the under-fire leader would remain at the helm in Karnataka, ending weeklong speculation about the fate of the party’s first chief minister in the south.

“After consultations with senior party leaders and state leaders, the party has decided to continue with B.S. Yeddyurappa as chief minister of Karnataka,” Gadkari said in a statement.

The BJP chief said Yeddyurappa, accused of freeing government land to favour his sons and relatives, had denied the graft allegations against him and “offered his response both publicly and to the party leaders”.

The statement ended the uncertainty over Yeddyurappa’s fate after the allegations against him had rendered untenable the BJP’s campaign on the spectrum controversy and other “scams”.

Sources said although party leaders had made up their minds yesterday to continue with Yeddyurappa, they deferred a formal announcement by a day, hoping the criticism it would provoke would be lost in the reactions to the Bihar verdict.

But the script faltered a bit when Congress chief Sonia Gandhi stressed on political probity and cited the removal of Ashok Chavan, Shashi Tharoor and K. Natwar Singh as examples.

“When we compare the action that our party takes (on corruption) with the action the other party takes, as you have mentioned the BJP in Karnataka, then I think it is for the people to judge and I am confident that they will judge us more positively,” Sonia said.

BJP leader Arun Jaitley said every party had “its own mechanism of making a political judgement” on issues that had been raised.

“The presence of numerically more corrupt persons in the Congress’s ranks will see more resignations. It is nothing to be proud of…” the Rajya Sabha Opposition leader said. “We have made a preliminary judgement, we will take a final view. The Congress leadership should confine itself to the serious problems they are facing.”

Gadkari said that apart from the commission of inquiry the Karnataka government had set up on the chief minister’s request, the BJP would separately examine the allegations of irregular land allotment.