Yeddyurappa quits as Karnataka CM just before trust vote

BENGALURU: BS Yeddyurappa has resigned as Chief Minister just two days after he took the oath of office. Just ahead of the trust vote in Karnataka Assembly, he addressed the House and conceded defeat. An emotional Yeddyurappa said that the situation would have been different if the people would have given just a few more seats to the BJP, enough to make them win the majority. “If only people would have given us 113 seats instead of 104, we would have made this state a paradise. Whether I stay in power or not, I will continue to work for the people. And we will get 28 out of 28 seats in Lok Sabha. For now, I will go to Raj Bhawan and tender my resignation.”

The Assembly session began on Saturday morning with newly-elected MLAs taking oath. They were administered oath by Protem Speaker KG Bopaiah. Yeddyurappa took the oath first, followed by Congress Legislature Party leader and his predecessor Siddaramaiah. Then the other members started taking oath in batches of five one after the other. The floor test was scheduled for 4 PM as per the Supreme Court’s on Friday ordered that drastically reduced the 15-day window given by the governor to Yeddyurappa to prove majority.
More so, in his press conference, Rahul interpreted Yeddyurappa and BJP’s inability to muster the required number (falling short of a majority by eight in a house of 224) as a vote against BJP and a mandate for Congress, but none of his present or potential allies in the future saw it like that.

They see it as a victory of the “regional front”. Mamata had earlier made her thoughts public when the Congress was pushing for the impeachment of Chief Justice of India Deepak Misra. She had also indicated that Rahul didn’t have the capacity to be the leader of an ‘alternate front’. In her tweet on Saturday, she has in a way reiterated the same position.

Rahul’s claim that the outcome was a victory for Congress and JD(S) in Karnataka is also flawed. People had voted to throw the Congress out of power in the state. Congress, which ruled the state for last five years, was reduced from 122 to 78 in the state Assembly, with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah losing one of two seats he contested, winning the other by a slender margin. Half of the party’s previous cabinet ministers also lost their respective elections and it counted losses all across the state. But then a parliamentary democracy is about numbers in the Assembly or in Parliament.
But, the fact remains that Congress, despite having 78 MLAs, has decided to play second fiddle to a party which has only 37 MLAs; a party whose influence is limited only to one particular part of the state