New Delhi: Senior BJP leader, once chief minister and six-term MLA, an angry Jagadish Shettar today resigned from the Karnataka assembly. He has not got a ticket by the embattled BJP for the state elections due in three and a half weeks.
On Sunday morning, Shettar reached Sirsi in Uttara Kannada district and handed over his resignation letter to assembly speaker Vishveshwar Hegde Kageri.
Later in the day, Shettar joined the Congress party. According to Deccan Herald, M.B. Patil and Shamanur Shivashankarappa acted swiftly to negotiate Shettar’s joining, including using their family connections to get in touch with him.
The resignation of senior politicians form the party has caused concern in the BJP camp and fellow former-chief minister, B.S. Yeddyurappa has been forced to publicly ask him to stay back in the party. “I want to ask Jagadish Shettar why is he joining Congress? If he comes back to BJP, we will welcome him”, ANI has reported him as saying.
Shettar was wanting a nomination to contest as the candidate from Hubballi-Dharwad central constituency. Reports say that chief minister Basavaraj Bommai and Union ministers Pralhad Joshi and Dharmendra Pradhan tried till late Saturday night to persuade him, “but he did not budge and remained adamant on his stand to contest”.
As The Wire reported, the departure of Laxman Savadi, an important player in the scheme of things and his joining the resurgent Congress appears to have jolted the BJP, which has lost an influential leader of the Lingayat community, which can determine the electoral outcome in the state. Savadi was a deputy chief minister in the BJP’s government.
Yesterday, Shettar said when asked by the BJP high command to drop his candidature for the assembly election from the Hubli-Dharwad Central segment that denying him a ticket will have a bearing on at least 20 to 25 seats in the state, according to the New Indian Express.
South First notes that Shettar is “the second prominent Lingayat leader to quit the BJP” (after Savadi).
Karnataka has a total of 224 assembly seats and the incumbent BJP government came to power after 17 defections from the Congress and JD(S) made that possible. Just one year and two months after it was formed in 2018, the Congress-Janata Dal (S) government fell in 2019 after it lost a controversial trust vote in the assembly 99-105.