Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa may have lost his voice as the pressure mounted to remove him from office, but he regained his clout on Monday after he persuaded the top leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party that they could not be judge and jury before the facts had been verified.
“I deserve a chance to prove my innocence,” he reportedly told the BJP’s top leaders, including Leader of the Opposition Arun Jaitley in New Delhi, on a day when the central BJP leaders were bombarded with BSY’s supporters who made clear that if Mr Yeddyurappa stepped down, the BJP government would fall, laying it open for President’s Rule and a backdoor entry for his arch rival the Janata Dal (S).
Speaking to reporters when he landed in the capital, he said: “Nobody has asked me to resign.”
Following hours of hard bargaining in Delhi, the final deal between Mr Yeddyurappa and the party central leaders saw the chief minister offer to subject himself to a probe by legal luminaries nominated by the party. “If the team finds Mr Yeddyurappa ‘guilty’ of misdeeds, he will be given his marching orders,” a senior BJP leader revealed.
Sources said that three former judges who are associated with the BJP would be drafted by the party central leadership to probe the alleged scams. The judges’ panel will go through the assets and liabilities of family members of Mr Yeddyurappa, besides examining the veracity of documents produced by Opposition parties vis-à-vis the nepotism, favouritism and illegal gratification of Mr Yeddyurappa.
“The composition of the panel will be finalised on Tuesday and the committee will be asked to give a report in a month’s time. If the judges find a strong case against Mr Yeddyurappa, he would be asked to step down,” sources said, adding that BSY himself is banking on adding the local bodies elections to his roll call of successful elections to seal the argument that the party needs him in Karnataka.
Mr Yeddyurappa won the day after he bargained long and hard with the party bigwigs, winning an assurance from him that he was safe even before he hitched a ride to Delhi aboard the Prime Minister’s special plane from Puttaparthi, where both he and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had participated in Sathya Sai Baba’s birthday celebrations.