By Faraz Ahmad
New Delhi, Sep 28 (IANS) Members of the legislative assembly from the ruling Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) may force Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy to keep his promise and hand over power to coalition partner Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because the alternative is early election which they do not want.
Kumaraswamy’s father, former prime minister and JD-S president H.D. Deve Gowda has been making statements in recent days showing his reluctance to hand over the chief minister’s chair to the BJP, as he had agreed to do 20 months ago.
Reportedly, according to party sources, Deve Gowda has even put out feelers to the Congress to ask if that party would enter into a coalition with JD-S and form the government once more.
The emissaries have reportedly offered the chief minister’s chair to the Congress for the rest of the term and have said that the JD-S would find it acceptable if M.V. Rajasekharan – son-law of former Congress president S. Nijalingappa – became the chief minister in a fresh coalition.
The Congress, however, does not seem willing to risk burning its finger twice. The JD-S had walked out of a coalition government with Congress and formed the present one in coalition with the BJP.
So that leaves Karnataka’s ruling father-son duo with two options – hand over the chief minister’s chair to the BJP as agreed, or precipitate an early election to the state assembly. And it looks increasingly likely that JD-S MLAs will not take kindly to the second option – they may even start deserting the party in droves.
The BJP seems to have become aware of this, and that is why its leaders have refrained from prolonging their war of words with Deve Gowda. In fact, after the first days of the controversy over the power sharing arrangement, they have bent over backwards to be nice to the JD-S leadership, quietly confident that they will soon have their first chief minister in a southern state.
There was more sign of this Friday when Karnataka Tourism Minister B. Sriramulu of the BJP took back his earlier charge that the chief minister had tried to get him killed.
“I am only saying that atrocities were being committed on BJP leaders and workers in the name of the chief minister,” Sriramulu told reporters in Bellary after casting his vote in local body polls.
Coming back to what the JD-S will do, Kumaraswamy did say Thursday that he was firm on his resolve to step down Oct 3 when his term ended under the agreement.
Though Kumaraswamy did not explicitly say if he would hand over power to the BJP when he stepped down, it appears that he has little choice, unless the results of Friday’s local body polls all over the state throws a joker into the pack by indicating that political winds are blowing in a completely new and unexpected direction.
Following its lie-low policy, all the BJP has done is to station party leader Yashwant Sinha in Bangalore to talk to Deve Gowda whenever the former prime minister feels like talking – after all, the two were fellow-travellers under the leadership of Chandra Shekhar once upon a time.