Bengaluru: Senior Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad and Kapil Sibal were rushed to Bengaluru on Tuesday at the behest of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi in an effort to keep the Congress-JD (S) government intact on a day when the crisis facing the coalition government deepened as another Congress MLA quit and the party sought the Assembly Speaker's intervention in disqualifying its rebel legislators even as it accused the BJP of using money power to lure its members.
Former Congress minister R Roshan Baig quit, raising the number of legislators who resigned to 14, but Speaker K R Ramesh Kumar's entry into the picture with the announcement that resignation letters of only five MLAs were in the approved format, gave leaders of the coalition a breather and time to send out fresh feelers to the rebels.
Mr Azad, one of the architects of the coalition arrangement following a fractured mandate in May 2018, is scheduled to meet JD (S) patriarch H D Deve Gowda to end the four-day-long impasse on the eve of the legislature session that commences on July 12. Mr Sibal is expected to use his expertise on Constitutional matters to deal with issues of disqualification of the rebels.
The duo arrived hours after Congress legislature party (CLP) leader Siddaramaiah threw caution to the winds and threatened to disqualify the rebel MLAs.
He followed it up with a complaint against eight legislators submitted to Mr Ramesh Kumar under the anti-defection law. Interestingly, the party spared former ministers R. Ramalinga Reddy, Mr Baig and Mr Anand Singh, in the petition seeking disqualification of disgruntled legislators, most of whom are holed up in Mumbai.
