Siddaramaiah rushes to Delhi, Meet to iron out Congress-JD(S) rift put off

Bengaluru: A special meeting convened to hammer out differences between the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) over Congress support for JD(S) candidate Prajwal Revanna in Hassan, was postponed following former CM Siddaramaiah's decision to suddenly visit Delhi. The next meeting will be held on March 24 at 7 pm in Bengaluru.

As per the schedule, the meeting was supposed to be held at Mr Siddaramaiah's residence in which PWD Minister H.D. Revanna, father of Prajwal was to participate. However, Mr Siddaramaiah left for Delhi on Thursday to participate in the meeting convened by Congress President Rahul Gandhi and is expected to return to Bengaluru on Friday night.

According to sources, even Mr Revanna had expressed his inability to attend the meeting due to his programmes in Hassan. In fact, a number of Hassan Congress leaders had come to Bengaluru to attend Thursday's meeting and left after they came to know that the meeting had been postponed.

Earlier at Wednesday's meeting, Hassan Congress leaders had openly criticised Mr Revanna's ‘politics’ in Hassan and his tactic of intimidating them by getting false cases registered. They did not want to support Prajwal unless Mr Revanna took an oath in a Hassan temple that he would not engage in a witchhunt of this kind in future, said sources.

Meanwhile, Energy Minister D.K. Shivakumar met Mandya Congress leaders and appealed to them to work for the JD(S) candidate, Nikhil Kumaraswamy, son of Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy, as per the directions of the party high command. Mr Cheluvarayaswamy and Mr Chandrashekar were among those who participated in this meeting.