After the pain, the balm. Three days after the Karnataka Assembly poll results were out, the recently launched Karnataka Janata Party (KJP) leader B S Yeddyurappa, who managed to win just six seats, was on Saturday cooling himself off at Ooty, the South’s Queen of Hill Stations.
With characteristic aplomb, the first BJP chief minister of Karnataka was visibly relaxed and unperturbed as he came over to Ooty along with his family members and went around the places of tourist interest there including the sprawling Botanical Garden.
The famous Flower Show also opened on Saturday, a huge summer attraction in the hill station town.
Interacting informally with some reporters at Udaghamandalam, as Ooty is officially known, Yeddyurappa claimed that for his KJP, launched barely five months ago, to “get such considerable people’s support” was in itself laudable in the just concluded Assembly elections in Karnataka.
Yeddyurappa took the opportunity to thank the electorate who voted for the KJP, assuring them to work “closely with the people” in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections in 2014.
The former chief minister, also ruled out having any truck with either the Congress or the BJP for the LS polls.
Expressing hope that his party by itself would perform better in the LS elections, Yeddyurappa played down the impact of corruption eating into the credibility of the political system. The KJP leader reasoned that corruption “is no big issue among the people at large.”
On the Cauvery waters issue between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, Yeddyurappa was skeptical about resolving it through the judicial process.
He said as it was an issue between the people of two States, adding the row could be settled amicably through talks.
Yeddyurappa’s political honeymoon with Tamil Nadu was at its peak, when in the early part of his tenure as Karnataka chief minister, a statue of the classical Tamil saint-poet Thiruvalluvar was unveiled in Bangalore.
