Guv must invite coalition: Cong
Cut going CM Siddaramaiah, senior Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad and Mallikarjuna Kharge along with JD(S) state Chief H D Kumaraswamy met Governor Rudabhai Vala and submitted a letter seeking an opportunity to form the government.
The Congress alleged a conspiracy being played out by the Bhartiya Janata Party with the help of its appointed Karnataka Governor Vajubhai Vala, who was a minister in the Gujarat government of Narendra Modi to form the government in the state despite not getting a majority in the counting held on Tuesday.
Soon after Janata Dal (Secular) leader H D Kumarswamy, son of former PM H D Deve Gowda, alongwith outgoing Congress chief minister Siddaramaiah, staked claim to form the coalition government, Congress communication chief Randeep Singh Surjewala cited four precedents and the Supreme Court judgments to assert the government has no choice but to invite the coalition having a clear majority.
UPA (United Progressive Alliance) chairperson Sonia Gandhi played the master stroke shortly after the noon when the picture became clear by ringing up both Deve Gowda and his son and offering the chief ministership to their JD(S) despite it winning lesser seats than the Congress. She promised an outside support of the Congress, but Deve Gowda insisted on a coalition government because of his bitter experience of how his government had fallen.
BSP supremo Mayawati and Trinamul Congress chief Mamata Banerjee are also reported to have spoken to Deve Gowda to accept the Congress offer as a united fight against the communal BJP. The JD(S) had an alliance with the BSP in this election and those elected include a BSP candidate as well.
Though the Congress initially expressed reluctance to join the government, Surjewala kept talking of the coalition government that the governor has to invite as the party was told by the constitutional experts that an outside support will mean all-time instability of the government which the governor may not accept.
Surjewala told a Press conference that the BJP is taking cover under the S R Bommai judgment of the 9judge Supreme Court Bench to claim it should be allowed to form the government as the single largest party.
The BJP has certainly emerged as the single largest party but it is still short of the half-way mark of 112 in the election held for 222 of the 224 Assembly seats and allowing it to form the government will only promote "horse trading" without which it just cannot prove a majority, the criteria fixed by the Supreme Court for deciding who can run the government, Surjewala said.
He said the BJP trying to defy the precedents cited by itself over the year. He said Atal Behari Vajpayee was invited to form a coalition government on March 12, 1998 by then President K R Narayanan setting a fair and constitutional precedent. The presidential communique is a guiding light in which Narayanan said: "when no party or pre-election alliance of parties is in a clear majority, the Head of State has in India or elsewhere, given the first opportunity to the leader of the party or combination of parties that has won largest number of seats subject to the Prime Minister so appointed obtaining majority support on the floor of the House within a stipulated time.
Surjewala said the BJP's claim of invitation to the "single largest party" was demolished by itself in three recent precedents, reminding it to an article of its then finance minister Arun Jaitley justifying the Goa governor inviting the post-poll alliance in view of a hung Assembly in the last elections.