13 Yeddy aides quit BJP govt

After the former chief minister of Karnataka was removed from presidentship of KJP, 13 of his supporters also decided to quit the government on Tuesday.

 

The Assembly Speaker, however, put their resignations on hold. The rebel MLAs identified with Yeddyurappa submitted their resignation letters in person to Speaker K G Bopaiah, quitting their assembly membership.

Bopaiah, who had a one-on-one meeting with the MLAs to ascertain whether they were doing so on their own, later put on hold the resignations, a move by Yeddyurappa to push the Jagadish Shettar government into a crisis ahead of budget session. Yeddyurappa slammed Bopaiah’s action, terming it as a ‘murder of democracy’ and demanded his resignation.

‘The BJP hatched the conspiracy to disqualify 13 MLAs supporting me only yesterday and Bopaiah is acting like a puppet at the hands of the ruling party,’ he charged.

The MLAs had tried to submit their resignations to Bopaiah on Saturday, but he was not in station, an issue over which they cried foul and submitted copies of the letters to Governor H R Bharadwaj.

In a counter offensive, two BJP legislators had petitioned the Speaker yesterday, seeking disqualification of the 13 rebel MLAs.

In another jolt, KJP founder president Padmanabha Prasanna has sent a communication to the Election Commission, stating that the party’s emergency executive meeting on 20 December 2012 had decided to revoke (withdraw) the decision to nominate Yeddyurappa as state unit president.