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BJP has still not given up in Karnataka despite not having numbers, is working on Plan B

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Party hopes to ensure that the Kumaraswamy government does not have the numbers in its first budget session; banks on differences between Congress, JD(S) leaders.

Bengaluru: The Congress is spending over a million rupees per day to hold its flock together in a five-star hotel in Bengaluru but the party may find the going tough—and probably more expensive— within the next two months as the BJP prepares to roll out its ‘Plan B’.

H.D. Kumaraswamy will be sworn-in as the Chief Minister of Karnataka on Wednesday, which will be followed by the trust vote in the assembly the next day. Ahead of that, the Congress has lodged its 78 MLAs at the Hilton, a five-star hotel in the state capital where its legislature party meeting was held on Tuesday — a rare venue for such a meeting for the Gandhian party.

The Hilton is fully booked until Wednesday. Single room occupancy in the hotel costs around Rs 14,000 per day and a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the lodging cost of the 78 MLAs comes to around Rs 11 lakh a day. This amount is hardly significant, given the stakes involved, even for the Congress whose funds have dipped drastically since the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

But having stretched the grand old party’s political and financial resources, the BJP is now looking at the next budget session to try and bring down the Kumaraswamy government. Outgoing chief minister Siddaramaiah had presented a populist budget in February 2018 but had to take a vote-on-account for three months as the budget couldn’t be passed due to the assembly elections.

Getting the budget passed by the new assembly will be the first big challenge for the new government and that’s where the BJP sees an opportunity. “Kumaraswamy will not be able to get the budget passed and that will be the end of his government,” a senior BJP functionary told ThePrint on condition of anonymity.

Short of seven MLAs to get a majority in the truncated 221-member assembly (excluding one of the two seats won by the chief minister designate), the BJP had allegedly tried to engineer defections in the Congress-JD(S) camp, forcing the latter to shift their MLAs to a luxury resort on the outskirts of Bengaluru before moving them further away to Hyderabad and bringing them back last Saturday for the trust vote. Sensing an impending defeat in the absence of the requisite numbers, Yeddyurappa, who headed the 55-hour-long BJP government, resigned before the trust motion was put to vote.

BJP leaders in Bengaluru told ThePrint that the Congress-JD(S) government was a “marriage of convenience” in which neither partner trusted the other. Many senior Congress leaders such as D.K. Shivakumar and G. Parameshwara  have been vocal against the Deve Gowda family for long. Many Congress MLAs have had the JD(S) as their principal opponent in their constituencies and they are uneasy about this alliance even though they have complied with the party high command’s wish at this stage.

“What will Kumaraswamy do if some MLAs from the ruling side go missing when the budget is to be passed? He can’t invoke the anti-defection law in such cases,” said a BJP office-bearer privy to the deliberations in the party.

Krishna Byre Gowda, a minister in the Siddaramaiah government, told ThePrint: “The vote on account is valid until 30 June, which is a normal practice. We have time until the end of June. Once the new government is formed, we will jointly discuss. Of course, the Congress will insist that it (Siddaramaiah’s budget) should be passed, but it is up to the new government to take a call whether we need to re-do the budget or go with the earlier budget.”

The BJP’s ‘Plan B’ apart, even some Congress leaders do not guarantee more than a year to the Kumaraswamy government. “Rahulji (Rahul Gandhi) wants us to support Kumaraswamy for an anti-BJP front at the national level in 2019. Who can guarantee what will happen after that?” said a state Congress leader, one of the many ministerial aspirants who are likely to weigh other options if they are not accommodated in the government.

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