Bharti surrenders, arrested

BJP calls Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh bandh, blames Sonia Gandhi for warrant

It is unfortunate that after 57 years of Independence, I have to go to jail because I hoisted the national flag," former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Uma Bharti said as she came out of a packed Hubli court where she surrendered before a magistrate.

She was arrested and will be lodged in a make-shift jail in Belgaum in an attempted murder case dating back 10 years.

Bharti said she held Congress chief Sonia Gandhi responsible for raking up the case, something the Congress Chief Minister of Karnataka, Dharam Singh, was quick to deny. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), powerful in north Karnataka, has got a tremendous boost in the state by the arrest, though whether this will affect the Maharashtra elections is yet to be seen.

The BJP has announced a day-long bandh tomorrow in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh and the turnout will determine how much the people of the two states have been swayed by the politics of competitive nationalism. "It will be a voluntary bandh," state BJP chief Ananth Kumar said.

The BJP's tactics in the Bharti case appeared to be straightforward. The party's collective ire was aimed at Sonia Gandhi at whose alleged instance, the case against Bharti was revived.

But Bharti spoilt the party's case somewhat by criticising the Karnataka chief minister for the way he had gone about handling the issue of non-bailable warrants against a fellow chief minister.

"Courtesy demanded that he (Dharam Singh) could have talked to me, which he did not do. I was also the chief minister. He could have spoken to me. He did not make me aware of it (sending the team)," she said.

"What I cannot imagine even now is what was the haste in sending the (police) team to arrest me. I am not able to understand. When (Pakistan President) Pervez Musharraf and Atal Bihari Vajpayee can talk, Dharam Singh could not talk to me?" Bharti said, for the first time betraying the hint of regret at the way she had had the crisis thrust upon her and had to resign from her post.

"If I did not want to be arrested, I would not have resigned. I resigned because I knew I would be arrested any minute. I did not want to be arrested as the chief minister because that would have brought disrespect to the chair. So I resigned and it means I am ready for any consequences," she told a press conference in Hubli. Bharti said Dharam Singh had "lost his vision" because of the "Italian influence".

Dharam Singh also felt the reverberations of the Bharti's arrest as he said it was not Sonia Gandhi or the state that was responsible for the arrest warrant but Bharti herself who had got embroiled in a case of attempted murder. Singh challenged the BJP to do its worst, either by way of bandhs or anything else.