A BJP MLA allegedly voted for a Congress candidate while another party MLA abstained from voting in the polling for four Rajya Sabha seats in Karnataka on Tuesday, catching the saffron party by surprise.
The outcome of the election was on expected lines with AICC leader Ajay Makan and sitting Congress members GC Chandrashekar and Syed Naseer Hussain, and BJP candidate Narayansa K Bhandage emerging winners.
The polls, however, exposed the chinks in the BJP ahead of the crucial Lok Sabha polls months away. The party is now mulling tough action against ST Somashekar, a Bengaluru MLA, on charges of defying the party whip. Shivaram Hebbar (Yellapur) absented himself, and the party has decided to wait and hear him out before taking a call on him.
The two MLAs were earlier with the Congress and switched over to the BJP in 2019, along with a bunch of others, helping the saffron party unseat the JDSCongress coalition regime and form a government of its own. Speculations swirled around for some time that the two lawmakers would return to Congress.
The JDS and BJP workers held protest demonstrations and burnt the effigy of Somashekar, while urging him to quit the BJP.The BJP has decided to seek disqualification of Somashekar for crossvoting in the polls, defying the whip, as it amounted to violating the antidefection law, the party legal cell head Vivek Subba Reddy said. He was confident that Somashekar’s membership would get disqualified henceforth. The party would move the Supreme Court if the Speaker delayed a decision, he said.The BJP, which had hoped the two MLAs would not ditch it, has decided to take Somashekar’s case to its logical conclusion. Former BJP minister and mining magnate G Janardhan Reddy (Gangavati) is said to have voted for the Congress. Reddy, against whom Siddaramaiah had waged a war and led a padayatra from Bengaluru to Ballari in 2010, has maintained a cordial relationship with the ruling party.
The success of all three Congress candidates has raised the morale of Congress workers and is sure to leave Deputy CM Shivakumar, who is also the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president, with one more feather on his cap. Known for pulling off election winning strategies in the past, Shivakumar managed to keep the Congress MLAs together and ensured the party got votes of independents too.
The CM attacked the JDS for fielding a candidate though the party lacked the number of votes it needed to win. “The party tried to lure the Congress MLAs..Do they have a conscience,” he posted on X.
Shivakumar called the act of the two BJP MLAs as their way of casting a “vote of conscience.” He wondered why the BJP candidate got 47 votes while the votes needed to win polls was 45 votes. “The BJP could have transferred surplus votes, but it has shortchanged the JDS by retaining 47 votes for its candidate,” he said, in a bid to pit the JDS against its alliance partner BJP. As for Somashekar, he said it was a vote against the unholy BJPJDS alliance,” Shivakumar, who is also the president of Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee said.
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