Lingayat MLAs give CM's punk
It is the strong backing of Lingayat MLAs that has provided all the confidence Chief Minister Yeddyurappa needed to defy the party high command’s direction to resign immediately.
Of the 38 BJP MLAs, 35 are said to be staunch Yeddyurappa followers. Except for Jagadish Shettar and S A Ravindranath, all Cabinet ministers are with the Chief Minister who is bargaining hard with the party high command to vacate the chief minister’s gaddi.
He wants to be made the State BJP president, besides being allowed to choose his successor. In other words, he wants to have full control of the party in the State as well as the government, even after giving up his post.
On Saturday, all these MLAs are learnt to have urged the party’s central leaders - Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh - to allow Yeddyurappa to continue as chief minister.
Despite being bed-ridden, MLA Eshanna Gulagannavar came on a wheelchair to meet the party leaders at a hotel and express his support for Yeddyurappa. The Lingayat community forms about 22 per cent of the total population of the State. The community has influence over 75 Assembly constituencies and a majority of them are in north Karnataka. The present Assembly has 61 Lingayat MLAs, including 38 from BJP, 18 from Congress and three from JD(S).
Community bond
Yeddyurappa, riding on the sympathy wave over denial of transfer of power by the JD(S), got the solid support of the Lingayat community in the 2008 Assembly elections. He subsequently became the chief minister. Since then, he shrewdly nurtured the community and emerged as a powerful Lingayat leader in the State. He has been in the good books of almost all the community pontiffs. He has generously contributed money by way of government grants to the Lingayat mutts. He openly defended it, saying that he wants to encourage good works being done by these mutts.
He has never antagonised the community pontiffs. Recently, he decided not to go ahead with land acquisition for the setting up of the Posco steel plant in Gadag, only because a local Lingayat mutt was against the project.
The chief minister declared that he will not do anything that the local mutt is against and rejected the plea by a section of farmers who wanted the project to be implemented.
The community pontiffs have, in turn, come to his rescue whenever he was in trouble. It was because of the open support of the community pontiffs that he managed to continue in his post last year, when he faced a slew of land scam allegations. But this time around, not much of the support was expressed by the seers.
Such is his clout over the community in north Karnataka that even Opposition party leaders belonging to the community dare not take him head on. Many Lingayat MLAs of Opposition parties were seriously considering joining the Yeddyurappa-led BJP, fearing that the community voters may not support them in the next election. But, the central leadership is not impressed.
