Hyderabad: Senior BJP leader P Muralidhar Rao Monday said his party would not try to destabilise the Congress-JD(S) government in Karnataka but indicated the coalition may fall before the year end.
The party general secretary in charge of Karnataka affairs said the BJP has maintained in the past year that the coalition government is not a stable one, it cannot survive and it would not last.
Rao, asked if the coalition government would last the calendar year 2019, told PTI here: “2019 itself may be a little longer; I don’t know because things are not stable is the fact.”
Also read: HD Kumaraswamy is heading to Karnataka’s villages to ‘reconnect’ after Lok Sabha poll loss
“New development has added to the problem”, he said, obviously referring to the coalition worries that have been compounded by the BJP’s spectacular performance, winning 25 of the 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state, leaving a mere one each to the Congress and JD(S).
The BJP-backed independent Sumalatha had also won.
The BJP had won 104 seats in the Assembly elections last year and added one more to its tally in the bypolls held along with recent Lok Sabha elections.
The ruling combine has 117 members — 78 of the Congress, 37 of the JD(S), one of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and one Independent.
“Basically, the government has become delegitimate, people have rejected it. Technically, as a combined force, they (Congress-JD-S) may say they have majority. But mandate is different, majority is different; so you are robbed off legitimacy,” Rao said.
Also read: Congress, JD(S) set out to save coalition in Karnataka but that only widens cracks
The BJP should not be too cocky. Karnataka Urban body polls were held on 29th May just 6 days after the Lok Sabha results came out. Surprise, surprise. Though the Congress and the JDS contested separately the Congress won 509 of 1221 wards (42%), the JDS another 174 (14%) and the BJP just 366 (30%). Again there should be no surprise, because paper ballots were used, not the much maligned EVMs.
This lends credence to the belief that the EVMs can be pre-programmed. Why not, if the Pentagon could be hacked, what is a mere EVM?
Another real surprise is that this BREAKING NEWS has not been carried in any newspaper. Channels that did carry it, took it off by evening. SHAME on Indian democracy and a pliant media.
The BJP has enough money to engineer defections as it has done earlier in Goa and right across the North East. Nothing to be proud of.