After embarrassing chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa for allotting Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) and Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board (KIADB) sites to his kith and kin, Janata Dal (S) state president H.D. Kumaraswamy came out with yet another revelation on Saturday.
He claimed that the chief minister’s sons, B.Y. Raghavendra and B.Y. Vijayendra, had received a huge amount of money from the sale of denotified land to a mining company and said the surrender of a few BDA and KIADB sites was a gimmick by the chief minister to salvage his reputation.
Speaking to mediapersons after releasing details of the bank accounts of Mr Raghavendra, Mr Vijayendra and the chief minister’s son-in-law, R.N. Sohan Kumar, here, Mr Kumaraswamy asked, “How shameless can they be? I would like to know if Mr Raghavendra and Mr Vijaynedra sold six acres of land to a Bellary based mining company, South West Mining Limited, for a whopping `20 crores.”
The former chief minister quoted a bank statement which claimed that Mr Vijayendra, Mr Raghavendra and Mr Sohan Kumar owned land near Manyata Tech Park in the city outskirts. He dared them to clarify if the land was passed on to them by their forefathers or was the same land which was denotified in a BDA layout by Mr Yeddyurappa sometime ago? “They must come clean on this issue. They cannot play a gimmick by surrendering one or two sites owned by them to state government agencies and retain large chunks of land denotifed by Mr Yeddyurappa,” he said.
According to him, Mr Yeddyurappa’s sons and son-in-law have turned out to be the “Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwara”, — denoting srishti (creation), sthithi (well-being) laya (destruction) — of land scams in the state.
Replying to a question, Mr Kumarswamy shot back that he was not exposing scams with selfish intentions but only wanted to protect state resources, which was his prime job as an Opposition party leader. “How can I keep quiet when he and his sons loot resources? As a responsible Opposition leader, I have my role to play,” he asserted.
He dared the chief minister to arrest him if he felt forged documents were being made public to malign him.