Will raise Karnataka land scams issue in Parliament: JD-S

Janata Dal Secular (JD-S) working president and former chief minister H D Kumaraswamy today demanded that all Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) sites, given to people who already owned residential properties in Bangalore, be taken back.

“Our objection is not to Raghavendra (son of Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa and Parliament member from Shimoga) being allotted a BDA site but to the false affidavit that he does not own residential property in Bangalore,” Kumaraswamy told reporters.

“This false statement could also cost him the Lok Sabha membership,” Kumaraswamy said. Raghavendra is a BJP Lok Sabha member from Shimoga, the home district of Yeddyurappa. Addressing a press conference here today, Kumaraswamy said he would raise the issue of alleged land scams during the B S Yeddyurappa regime in the Parliament. He charged the chief minister with favouring his family members in the allotment.

Kumaraswamy, who is also a member of parliament, alleged that scams are estimated to have cost the state exchequer a loss of '5,000 crore to '6,000 crore during Yeddyurappa’s tenure. JD-S would seek time in the Parliament to raise the issue of scams, he said, adding he will stage a dharna if the demand was not granted. “I don’t mind being evicted (from Lok Sabha) also. There is no question of going back. We will take it to its logical end,” he said.

While BJP leaders raised the telecom and Adarsh society scams aggressively in the Parliament, he wanted to know their stand and yardstick vis-a-vis Karnataka land scams.

He alleged that while Yeddyurappa denotified land to favour his sons, his predecessors did it according to the law and not to benefit their family. Meanwhile, as allegations of favoured land allotment to his relatives surfaced, Yeddyurappa pledged not to succumb to any pressure in land deals henceforth. “I have prayed to Lord Nanjundeshwara for more than an hour recently and pledged in his name that henceforth I will not transgress boundaries of law in land allotment,” the embattled chief minister told reporters in Mangalore, about 350 km away from here.