I contest for them, and they betrayed me, says Gowda

Rural Development and Panchayat Raj (RDPR) minister Krishna Byre Gowda revealed on Tuesday he was in debt because rebel MLAs ST Somashekhar, K Gopalaiah and Byrati Basavaraj pushed him to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Bangalore North, which he lost.

“I want to explain why we are so disturbed with our MLAs having jumped ship,” Gowda said during a debate on Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy’s confidence motion in the Legislative Assembly.

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“It was Gopalaiah, Somashekhar and Basavaraj who proposed by name for the Bangalore North segment despite me saying I wasn’t ready to contest. They asked me to do it for them. I had just 16 days to contest an election from a segment comprising 28 lakh voters. I lost and I’m not in debt. For whom did I contest? I went against my family listening to them because I saw them as my family, my brothers,” he said.

Gowda, a last-minute choice, lost to BJP’s DV Sadananda Gowda.

“They betrayed our faith,” he said, “and we fear that they’ll be stranded on the streets chasing court cases just for the sake of your greed for power.”

Gowda warned the rebel legislators that they had already incurred disqualification. “One doesn’t have to defy the whip to get disqualified. Moving away from their political party and hobnobbing with another party is enough for disqualification,” he said, citing the example of how Rajya Sabha chairman Venkaiah Naidu had disqualified rebel JD(U) MP Sharad Yadav.