Bengaluru: The state Congress had ordered all its legislators to attend a meeting on Friday, January 18, or face action. Top leaders had insisted that all the 80 of its lawmakers in the state should attend the meeting and warned that absence would be seen as exit from the party.
However, four lawmakers evaded party leaders’ calls and were a no-show to the meeting.
According to reports, Umesh Jadhav, Ramesh Jarkiholi and Mahesh Kumathalli are believed to be at a Mumbai hotel. The first two, along with the fourth missing lawmaker B Nagendra, were dropped recently from the state cabinet, and are openly upset.
Reports also say that BJP parliamentarian Sanjay Ramchandra Patil had visited the hotel this morning to meet them.
Ramesh Jarkiholi has been incommunicado since Tuesday. Former chief minister Siddaramaiah, who is the leader of the Congress Legislature Party reportedly asked Jarkiholi’s brother Satish Jarkiholi to call him. Satish, a first-time legislator who was made a minister in the cabinet, tried to get his brother to come around, without luck.
Hitting out at B S Yeddyurappa, Siddaramaiah asked, “Yeddyurappa was chief minister and has been accusing me of poaching MLAs. Does he have any self-respect?”
B Nagendra, one of the Congress lawmakers who went missing, denied that he was in touch with the BJP. “I went to Mumbai for personal reasons. I have business there and go there from time to time. Don’t take it in any other way that I was in contact with someone. I’m not against anyone. I’m not going to BJP. I don’t know about Ramesh Jarkiholi,” Nagendra told reporters.
Congress rebels at a luxury hotel in Mumbai and 104 BJP lawmakers sequestered at a resort in Gurgaon near Delhi this week set the stage for what many believed was a Karnataka coalition crash engineered either by the BJP or within the Congress. The speculation peaked after two independent lawmakers withdrew support from the Kumaraswamy-led Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) government.
The JDS-Congress alliance has 118 lawmakers in the 224-member Karnataka assembly where the majority mark is 113.
