Our handling of Karnataka has been absolutely opportunistic: LK Advani

NEW DELHI: Senior BJP leader LK Advani has described his party’s handling of its Karnataka affairs as absolutely opportunistic, hitting out at those who blame his stand of acting firmly against the tainted former chief minister BS Yeddyurappa for the debacle in the recent assembly polls. “The surprise would have been if we had won,” said Advani, who rejected the overwhelming view in the BJP’s parliamentary board that the exit of the powerful Lingayat leader had hurt the party by robbing it of its core vote bank among the sizeable community.

“When it became apparent that he was unabashedly indulging in corruption, if the party had immediately taken firm action, the course of events would have been quite different,” Advani wrote in his blog, “But for several months, frantic efforts went on somehow to keep placating him by condoning his peccadilloes. The justification given was that if the party did not adopt such a ‘pragmatic’ approach we would lose the only government that we had in the south.”

At the parliamentary board’s meeting, which was also attended by Advani, the party decided to send Nitin Gadkari and Dharmendra Pradhan to Bangalore on May 18 for election of the legislative party leader. Gadkari was the party president when the Lokayukta report named Yeddyurappa in an illegal mining case and Pradhan was the general secretary in-charge of Karnataka.

Even as the party leaders did not rule out an alliance with Yeddyurappa’s KJP, Advani wrote, “Our response to the Karnataka crisis was not at all a minor indiscretion. I have consistently maintained that our handling of Karnataka has been absolutely opportunistic.” Advani said the indignation that corruption provoked in Bangalore was being reflected in New Delhi too.

“I hold that it is the Karnataka results that have contributed to clinching action being taken even in the matter of Coalgate and Railgate! Before Karnataka results, the Congress Party seemed determined not to do anything about the two scams even if it meant a total washout of the second half of the Budget Session,” he wrote.