Bengaluru, July 28:Karnataka Speaker KR Ramesh Kumar on Sunday disqualified 14 rebel legislators with immediate effect till end of the assembly term.
The development comes a day before BS Yediyurappa, the new chief minister of Karnataka, proves his majority in the House. Yediyurappa’s party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has 105 MLAs in the 224-member Assembly. Of the legislators who faced the Speaker’s action, 11 are from the Congress and three from JDS.
The latest twist comes in an already dramatic tale of tug-of-war for power between the BJP and Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) alliance more than a year after the state witnessed assembly elections. Fifteen rebel MLAs had submitted their resignations to the Speaker a few days ago, leading to the collapse of the Congress-JD(S) government in a floor test.
The collapse followed days of theatrical developments that saw the rebels, some of them ministers and all from the ruling coalition, stayed cooped at a hotel in Mumbai and refusing to join the Assembly proceedings.
The Speaker continued to sit over their resignations, instead considering their disqualification from the House—decisions that led to allegations that he was deliberately delaying the inevitable to allow the Congress-JD(S) government under HD Kumaraswamy to survive.
The Congress-JD(S) coalition meanwhile began to engage the rebels to have them come back. Both sides even knocked the doors of the Supreme Court for an intervention.
No amount of coaxing and haggling however could help convince the rebel MLAs—on July 23, Kumaraswamy’s government lost the trust vote 99-105. Agencies
