Fresh rift in BJP as Santhosh, BSY at loggerheads again

The fight for one-upmanship in the BJP between party state president B S Yeddyurappa and national joint organisational secretary B L Santhosh has come to the fore again, this time over the composition of booth campaign committee.

Yeddyurappa and Santhosh, both of whom have been closely associated with the party at the grassroots, have not been seeing eye to eye for some time now.

Santhosh is unhappy with Yeddyurappa’ style of functioning. The former chief minister, for his part, is of the opinon that Santhosh has been working against him and is behind his rift with senior leader K S Eshwarappa.

Things were moving quite smoothly after BJP national president Amit Shah cracked the whip, warning against any sort of indiscipline in the party during his recent visit to the state. But, Santhosh is now in New Delhi and is likely to petition the central leadership on Yeddyurappa’ style of functioning, on the sidelines of the party’s national executive meeting on Monday. Yeddyurappa, too, is in Delhi to attend the meeting.

The latest cause for the rift is that supporters of Santhosh, including MLC M B Bhanuprakash, former legislators A H Shivayogiswamy and Nirmal Kumar Surana and party functionaries Nandish and Keshav Prasad, were not invited for the booth campaign committee’s maiden meeting in Bengaluru on Saturday despite them being on the panel. Some of them even got a call from the party headquarters that the meeting had been cancelled. But the meeting took place.

Those in the Yeddyurappa camp are of the opinion that Santhosh had included the names of his supporters without any consultation and thus they had no business to attend the meeting. They point out that Bhanuprakash and Surana had, in fact, been removed as party vice-presidents for speaking out against Yeddyurappa.

However, Santhosh’s supporters said the 40-member booth campaign committee had been vetted by Shah himself and they had been deliberately misled from attending the meeting.

“It is an unfortunate development coming at a time when there was a feeling everything is well in the party,” Banuprakash said.

In another development, Yeddyuruppa’s decision to reinstate former MLC G Madhusudhan as party spokesperson has been kept in abeyance by the central leadership.

Maiden meeting of two other committees constituted recently - conventional media campaign committee and social media campaign committee - are likely to be held in coming days.

Senior leaders including S M Krishna, S Suresh Kumar and Aravind Limbavali have been appointed as members of social media campaigning committee. The conventional media campaign committee comprises Union Minister Ananth Kumar, senior leaders K S Eshwarappa and Jagadish Shettar among others.