Yeddyurappa and Siddaramaiah: Divided on party lines, united by corruption
Former Karnataka chief minister BS Yeddyurappa, the man credited with providing the BJP its first success in south India has been brought in by the party as its Karnataka unit president. Taking over this mantle for the fourth time, his main job is to take on chief minister Siddaramaiah.
While the incumbent chief minister is from the Kuruba community, the third largest caste in Karnataka and considered its tallest leader, Yeddyurappa is the undisputed leader of the largest community - the Lingayats and interestingly, shares many a similarity with his rival.
Even before Yeddyurappa got to fire his first salvo as the BJP state unit president, controversy erupted over him getting as a gift, a Rs 1.15 crore swanky SUV. The Toyota Land Cruiser Prado was provided by Murugesh Nirani, former the large and medium industries minister of Karnataka and a sugar baron.
It stirred a hornet's nest after reports came in that it would be used by the former chief minister to travel around the drought-hit parts of the state. Yeddyurappa was forced to return this SUV after questions were raised about its propriety. Now he says he will tour the state by train.
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| Siddaramaiah faced flak for flaunting a “Rs 70 lakh diamond-studded Hublot watch”. |
There was a replay of the same sequence in February this year. That time, Siddaramaiah faced flak for flaunting a “Rs 70 lakh diamond-studded Hublot watch”. He too claimed that it was a gift, in his case from a Dubai-based surgeon friend, Dr Girish Pillai Chandra Varma.
The chief minister described the gift as a gesture made out of “love and affection” by Dr Verma. The doctor had purportedly gifted the watch to Siddaramaiah in 2015. Dr Varma had also submitted an affidavit stating that he had gifted the watch out of friendship and affection. But controversy over it forced Siddaramaiah to declare it a state asset.
Earlier this month, Siddaramaiah came under fire over his son Yathindra Siddaramaiah being permitted to set up a laboratory and diagnostic facility at government-run hospitals. The laboratory was to be run in partnership with Matrix Imaging Solutions India Private Limited, in which the chief minister's son is a director.
Initially, Siddaramaiah denied any wrongdoing. The defence put forward by him was that the company had participated in the tender process and being the lowest bidder had won the contract to set up laboratories. But when the issue snowballed into a big controversy, Yathindra Siddaramaiah, quit from his post in the firm that had bagged the plum contract.
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| Yeddyurappa has been alleged of nepotism during his tenure as the CM.. |
In 2010, when Yeddyurappa was the chief minister of Karnataka, reports came out about how, over the years, Yeddyurappa’s family members — his two sons, daughter and sister — were given plots of land acquired by the government for public projects in and around Bangalore.
Allegations were levelled on how the chief minister misused his office to ensure his relatives and their companies were the beneficiaries of a massive land scam. Reports also highlighted how government land was de-notified in a matter of days and made available to the chief minister's family. When Yeddyurappa started feeling the heat, his family returned all the land allotted to them by the Karnataka Industrial Development Board and Bangalore Development Authority.
Yeddyurappa was forced to resign as the chief minister in 2011 over graft charges, following which he quit the party to form his own outfit, the Karnataka Janata Party (KJP). The KJP failed to make a mark other than cause damage to the BJP in the 2013 polls.
He came back to the BJP after the announcement of Narendra Modi being the party’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. It seems that fulfilling his chief ministerial ambition comes before the party or its ideology.
Siddaramaiah is also a product of the Janata Parivar. After the split of the Janata Dal into JD(U) and JD(S), he sided with the latter headed by HD Deve Gowda. But when his chief ministerial ambition clashed with that of Deve Gowda's son HD Kumaraswamy, he left the party and joined the Congress in 2006. Siddaramaiah finally became a chief minister in 2013. So, both he and Yedurrapa seem to be more faithful to their personal ambitions than to any party or ideology.
Before becoming the chief Minister, Yeddyurappa became deputy chief minister in Kumaraswamy's government. Siddaramaiah too has served twice as the deputy chief minister. First when JH Patel was the chief minister and then again when Dharam Singh was the chief minister.
On April 17, nine days after appointing Yeddyurappa as the Karnataka chief of the BJP, Modi addressed a rally in West Bengal. Comparing allegations of corruption against the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) with those against the Congress, he said both the parties shared the same gotra.
In Hindu society, the term gotra means clan. But the prime minister was talking not about common genes but about common traits, in this particular instance, the taint of corruption. So if one is to go by the prime minister's own parameters regarding the identification of gotra, can there be a better case than of Yeddurappa and Siddaramaiah sharing the same traits?