Jaitley in Bangalore, no meeting with Yeddyurappa

Senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley arrived in Bangalore late Monday but no meeting is scheduled with dissident leader B.S. Yeddyurappa as the former Karnataka chief minister left for his home town.

"I am leaving for Shimoga (about 200 km north of Bangalore) as I have prior commitments," Yeddyurappa, who recently praised Nehru-Gandhi family leadership and slammed his own party president Nitin Gadkari and senior leader L.K. Advani, told reporters here as Jaitley landed.

Jaitley is on a private visit to the city and is accompanied by party general secretary in-charge of Karnataka affairs Dharmendra Pradhan.

He would, however, meet other Karnataka Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders to discuss the continuing infighting in the state, party sources said.

Yeddyurappa said he might meet Jaitley and other BJP leaders when he visits New Delhi next week.

The former chief minister has been lashing out at his party central leaders, particularly Gadkari and Advani, for not re-instating him as chief minister or made state party chief.

Yeddyurappa has been claiming that when he quit July last year over mining bribery allegations Gadkari had promised to make him state party chief within 24 hours and re-instate him as chief minister in six months.

Two days back he told a public meeting in Bangalore that the BJP would regret "suppressing" him.

The state assembly polls are due May next year and the former chief minister has clearly indicated that he would leave the party by December.

His increasingly bitter attacks on the party leadership is seen in BJP circles as an attempt to force the party to expel him which would help projecting himself as a victim.

The BJP came to power for the first time in Karnataka in May 2008 but its rule has been marred by scores of corruption scandals with around 20 of the party's 120 legislators in the 225-member assembly fighting cases ranging from graft to land grab to rape.

Yeddyurappa leads the pack with over a dozen cases of corruption and illegal land deals cases against him and his two sons B.Y. Raghavendra, a BJP Lok Sabha member from Shimoga, and B.Y. Vijayendra and son-in-law R.N. Sohan Kumar.