How can BJP asks for PM's head: Gowda

JD(S) chief H D Deve Gowda today took a dig at central BJP leaders for demanding Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s resignation over Bofors payoffs while maintaining ‘silence’ over corruption charges against the party’s chief minister in Karnataka.

“What moral right do they have to speak on Manmohan Singh? If they have minimum decency and an iota of shame, B S Yeddyurappa should have been asked to step down,” the former prime minister said, continuing his tirade against the Yeddyurappa government. Lashing out at BJP for its ‘silence’ over the ‘scams’, Gowda said, “For Rs 41 crore, they say it is a scandal. In Karnataka the scandals amount to Rs 1 lakh crore. It is one of the heinous acts of the BJP central leadership to support this century’s scam government.”

Gowda said he had sent a booklet his party has brought out on ‘corruption’ in Yeddyurappa government to senior leaders of BJP including, L K Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley. Targeting Jaitley, who is one of the in-charges of BJP affairs in Karnataka, he said he was not speaking of the corruption charges faced by Yeddyurappa. He claimed, when Jaitley called on Governor H R Bhardwaj recently, he was provided with documentary evidence on scandals of Yeddyurappa government and added: “But still, he (Jaitley) does not want to speak on them”.

A day after Congress permitted its Karnataka unit to tie up with JD(S) to rule zilla and taluk panchayats which have returned a fractured verdict in recent polls, Gowda urged all secular parties to come together to take the fight against the BJP government to the logical end.

“No question of showing mercy. It should quit,” Gowda insisted.

Training his guns on Yeddyurappa, Gowda quipped, “The chief minister calls the opposition stalling governor’s address as murder of democracy. A day after panchayat election results are out, BJP launched ‘operation lotus’ (allegedly luring Opposition members to switch sides), Which act is really a murder of democracy?”

He charged that BJP had stretched its new experiment of ‘defection’ to local bodies too, and slammed the party’s efforts to ‘lure’ Opposition members in Raichur and Bellary districts.