By IANS
Bangalore/New Delhi : Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Wednesday told a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) delegation that Karnataka Governor Rameshwar Thakur be given “reasonable time” to decide on their claim to form government along with the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S).
“The prime minister suggested that the governor be given reasonable time. But we told him that four days have passed since we handed over the letter (to form a) government headed by B.S. Yeddiyurappa,” BJP vice president M. Venkaiah Naidu told reporters after a 30-minute meeting with Manmohan Singh.
While the BJP team led by L.K. Advani and party chief Rajnath Singh met the prime minister, the party and its estranged ally JD-S held rallies in Bangalore and other places in the state protesting the delay in inviting the combine to form the government.
Thakur has not shown any hurry to decide on their claim and is yet to send a report on the situation in the state to the president. “I will send it in a day or two,” he told Yeddiyurappa Tuesday.
While Thakur decides on the claim by the two estranged partners, the Congress has also kept up pressure on him to dissolve the assembly, which still has 20 months left.
Congress’ Karnataka in-charge Prithviraj Chavan met Thakur in Bangalore Wednesday morning and told him that the BJP and JD-S had come together after falling apart and bitterly fighting in the last three weeks.
“It is an opportunistic alliance and cannot be expected to provide a stable and clean government and hence the combine’s claim should not be entertained,” Chavan told a party meeting after meeting the governor.
The JD-S/BJP coalition had split – only to come together now — when JD-S chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy refused to give up the post for the BJP after 20 months according to the agreement between the two parties. The state is now under President’s rule and the assembly kept in suspended animation.
Kumaraswamy and his father, JD-S president, H.D. Deve Gowda somersaulted Saturday and extended support to a Yeddiyurappa-led government, three weeks after refusing to do so.
The two parties staked claim to form government the same day, and Monday presented 120 supporting legislators to Thakur to establish their majority in the 225-member assembly.
According to indications from the Congress party, Thakur is unlikely to recommend any course of action to the president in his report.
He may only send a factual report on the claim, the numbers the two parties presented and the legal opinion he has received from constitutional experts in the state and leave the matter to be decided by the president.
The possible reason for Thakur to opt for such a course is the complicated nature of the case.
It does not strictly fall within the ambit of the earlier Karnataka and Bihar cases where in the Supreme Court held that majority of a party or combination of parties should be tested on the floor of the assembly and not in Raj Bhavans.
In neither case had the coalition partners come together again after falling apart over power sharing arrangement. In both cases, the concerned governors had recommended dismissal of the governments without giving an opportunity to prove the majority in the assembly.
But in Karnataka, not only did the coalition collapse but both parties wrote formal letters to the governor seeking immediate dissolution of the assembly.
Informed sources say that legal opinion given to Thakur is divided – some have been saying he has no option but to invite the combine to form the government. But others are of the view that he need not do so given the way the two parties fell apart and quarrelled in the last three weeks.