Sadananda Gowda inducts 21 ministers, Bellary trio out

Second phase of expansion likely next week; new chief minister to visit Delhi on Monday, meet party heads, prime minister.

As many as 21 ministers took the oath of office in Karnataka, four days after D V Sadananda Gowda was sworn in as chief minister. All those inducted were part of the earlier ministry.

While their rank wasn’t announced on Monday, all 21 were of cabinet rank in the predecessor ministry of B S Yeddyurappa.

The cap on the number of ministers in the state (a tenth of the combined strength of both houses of the state legislature) is 34, including the CM. “The remaining posts will be filled within a week,” Gowda told reporters before going to Raj Bhavan for the ceremony.

Yeddyurappa had a 34-member ministry, of which 26 had cabinet rank. Three of them, who were strongly indicted by the state Lokayukta report on the mining scam, were not among those inducted on Monday. The trio are brothers Karunakara and Janardhana Reddy and B Sriramulu, all from the Bellary region, at the core of the said scam, the revelations on which in the Lokayukta report led to the earlier ministry’s fall. However, another minister who was named in the report, V Somanna (he had the housing portfolio), was inducted on Monday. The party’s explanantion was that the charge against him was quite minor.

The 21 inducted are from the rival factions of the Bharatiya Janata Party, those supporting the outgoing CM and his rival, Jagadish Shettar. The count is respectively 12 and nine from the two groupings. Shettar himself took the oath. Gowda, a former state party head and in his second Lok Sabha term, was Yeddyurappa’s choice as successor. A majority of MLAs voted for him in a straight contest over Shettar, who was minister in charge of rural development and panchayati raj in the earlier ministry.

The others inducted were R Ashoka, V S Acharya, C M Udasi, Govind M Karjol, Vishveshwara Hegde, S Suresh Kumar, Shobha Karandlaje, S A Ravindranath, Basavaraj Bommai, Murgesh R Nirani, Umesh Katti, S A Ramdas, Revu Naik Belamgi, C C Patil, Lakshmi Savadi, B N Bachche Gowda, A Narayanaswamy, V Somanna, M P Renukacharya and Krishna Palemar.

Yeddyurappa and state BJP head, K S Eshwarappa, were both present at the ceremony. According to a consensus at a meeting between the two factions at the new CM’s residence this afternoon, there will be no post of deputy chief minister, for now. All the 21 ministers, it appears, are likely to retain their previous portfolios.

Later, addressing a press conference, Sadananda Gowda said, “I have completed the first phase of cabinet expansion today. Now, my government will focus on the development works in the state. Our aim is to make the state number one in the country.”

He will be in Delhi tomorrow, to meet senior party leaders. He is to also meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Of the 21 ministers, 10 belong to the Lingayat community, four are Brahmins, three are Vokkaligas, three belong to scheduled castes and one is from a backward community.

The delay in the ministry’s formation of ministry was due to differences on the number of posts and portfolios to be given to the rival groupings.