New Delhi, May 17: BJP leaders claimed today they had demonstrated before the President that B.S. Yeddyurappa had enough MLAs on his side missed but many in the team missed a delectable irony — Sushma Swaraj held the Karnataka chief minister’s hand briefly.
Sushma’s gesture, made as the group emerged to address the media after meeting Pratibha Patil, was seen as a change in favour of the beleaguered chief minister. In the past, whenever Yeddyurappa was caught in a crisis, the BJP’s perception was that Sushma would rather let him stew in his own juice than pull him out of it because she backed a faction opposed to him.
The Lok Sabha Opposition leader was seen as a mentor of the Reddy brothers of Bellary through an association that dates back to 1999 when she contested against Sonia Gandhi from the mining town. The brothers have had a running battle with Yeddyurappa who often tried to undermine their political and economic clout. They retaliated by fielding dissidents against him and destabilising his regime periodically.
But this time, the pattern appears to have been reversed. After governor H.R. Bharadwaj recommended central rule in the state over the weekend and plunged Yeddyurappa into his new crisis, the central BJP leaders realised that rather than show their like and dislike for Yeddyurappa, they should “sink or swim” with him.
The timing of Bharadwaj’s recommendation couldn’t have been more inopportune for the BJP. It drew a blank in most of the five seats that went to the polls recently, prompting Pranab Mukherjee’s jab that a “national party (BJP) claiming to form a government in the state (Assam) could not even touch double digits”.
A BJP leader said the barb “hit us where it hurt the most”. “To not react to Bharadwaj’s salvo aggressively would have been a sign of defeatism,” the leader said. So in their first meeting after the poll results, held at L.K. Advani’s residence on Monday, BJP leaders resolved to take the bull by its horns.
Sources said the first task was to dispel the impression that the party was a divided house on Yeddyurappa. That perception in the past allowed Bharadwaj and the Congress to play the field with more dexterity than the BJP, which often left the chief minister to fend for himself.
Not this time. The Reddy brothers of Bellary — earlier used by Yeddyurappa’s detractors in Delhi to needle him— were told to lay off. Intermediaries were used to touch base with the BJP MLAs whose disqualification was held illegal by the Supreme Court last week, and they were won over.
So when Nitin Gadkari, Arun Jaitley, Sushma and other BJP leaders walked into Rashtrapati Bhavan this evening, party chief Gadkari claimed to have paraded 114 MLAs, two more than the 112 required for majority in the 224-member Assembly, before the President. Earlier in the day, Yeddyurappa had himself claimed he had 122 MLAs and “thanked” Bharadwaj for “uniting” the BJP around him.
None of the leaders who met the President Patil and urged her to recall Bharadwaj said why the chief minister was unwilling to take a floor test. But if a confidence vote became necessary, sources said the central leaders had advised Yeddyurappa to do so without any ado. “We should not lose our first government in the south and bolster Mukherjee’s claim that we are not a national party,” a source said.
The governor’s office issued a statement today linking the recommendation for central rule to the “deliberate subversion of the floor test” last October which it said “resulted in the breakdown of the constitutional mechanism”. On October 11, 2010, 16 MLAs, 11 from BJP and five Independents, were disqualified by the Speaker who invoked the anti-defection law since they had moved against the chief minister.
As the Delhi drama unfolded, Yeddyurappa’s rivals in Bangalore hit the streets and even offered prayers for his ouster.
Senior Congress leaders, including state party chief G. Parameshwar, and Janata Dal (Secular) P.C. Siddaramiah courted arrest after traffic-choking protests.
Later, Parameshwar visited the famous Rajarajeshwari temple, as if to firewall the divine assistance Yeddyurappa sought at the Raghavendra Swami shrine in Delhi’s R.K. Puram earlier in the day. “I am sure this is the end of the corrupt BJP government,” Parameshwar said.
Leader of the Opposition Siddaramiah and his father, former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, met the governor separately. But Gowda claimed he had only gone to wish Bharadwaj on his birthday. “I am not a fool to talk politics on the governor’s birthday,” he retorted when asked what was discussed.
