Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa may not have anticipated the storm that has started brewing in his party when he magnanimously agreed to disqualified MLA Anand B Singh’s demand to bifurcate Ballari district and carve out a new one to be called Vijayanagar district, the constituency which Singh represented.
Opposition to the proposed Vijayanagar district, which will be the 31st in Karnataka, has come from BJP leaders who call the shots in Ballari. While Health and Family Welfare Minister B Sreeramalu was subdued in his opposition to the new district saying he does not want to embarrass the CM and that he would raise the issue in the cabinet meeting, the BJP MLA representing Ballari city G Somashekhar Reddy, brother of former legislator G Janardhana Reddy, described the move as “selfish” and one that Yediyurappa should not have agreed to.
With the CEC announcing bye-polls to 15 of the total 17 Assembly constituencies in Karnataka, it has to be seen whether Yediyurappa can go ahead in implementing the proposal as the Model Code of Conduct has come into effect from Saturday.
Among the Congress leaders in the district barring Allum Veerbhadrappa and KC Kondaiah, no one has come forward to support the move. Apart from sporadic protests in the district, a bandh has been called on Sunday by local organisations in Hagaribomanahalli constituency, which is proposed to be part of the new Vijayanagar district.
On Saturday, an organisation called the Tungabhadra Raitha Sangha, comprising representatives from all political parties, announced a series of agitations from September 23, if the new district idea was not dropped. According to the Sangha’s president Darur Purushothamgouda, the CM had not taken the opinion of all parties leaders on the issue and had solely gone by Singh’s request.
Anand Singh’s contention for the establishment of a new district is that it will help promote tourism, especially the monuments in Hampi, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Hampi had once served as the capital of the Vijayanagar empire, one of the greatest in south India.
Ballari district was formed in 1802 during the British regime and had 20 taluks initially. After the reorganisation of states, some taluks went to Andhra Pradesh. Now it has 11 taluks.
Singh’s pitch for the new district is also said to be preparing the ground for the Vijayanagar Assembly bye-poll from where he plans to recontest on a BJP ticket, if the Supreme Court upholds the plea of the disqualified MLAs.
Singh, who was the tourism minister during the BJP’s regime in 2008-2013, was associated with the mining czars, the Reddy brothers. He quit the BJP and joined the Congress in January 2018. In July this year, when dissidence broke out among the Congress-JD(S) legislators, Singh was one of the first to raise the banner of revolt and come out. His demands then were formation of Vijayanagar district and withdrawal of the Kumaraswamy cabinet’s decision to sell 3,667.31 acre of land to JSW Steel in Ballari district.
Yediyurappa’s immediate nod to Singh’s representation, when a similar demand to trifurcate the unwieldy Belagavi district has been pending since decades, has surprised all. Belagavi with 18 Assembly constituencies has been seeking trifurcation of the district into Belagavi, Gokak and Chikkodi, but the issue has been stalled due to local political pressures and also Maharashtra’s opposition in the background of the border dispute between the two states having remained unresolved.
In his note to the Karnataka government chief secretary TM Vijay Bhaskar to make a case for the bifurcation of Ballari, Yediyurappa said some of the regions in the district are at a distance of 200 km from the headquarters. This makes it difficult for farmers, economically backward sections, labourers and others living in taluks farther away to travel for official work. For the convenience of the general public and ease of administration, the CM suggested carving out a new Vijayanagar district with Hosapete as its headquarters.
Of the 11 taluks, five – Ballari, Kurugodu, Siraguppa, Sandur and Kudligi – will be part of Ballari district, while six other taluks – Hosapete, Kampli, Hagaribommanahalli, Kottur, Hadagali and Harappanahalli – will constitute the new Vijayanagar district.
It is just not Vijayanagar district that has created ripples in the BJP. Yediyurappa’s largesse to the disqualified MLAs’ constituencies last week has also caused a lot of heartburn. The 17 disqualified MLAs have been meeting the CM in batches and the surplus amount sanctioned to each constituency of these former MLAs is said to be in the range of Rs 10 crore to Rs 25 crore.
Naheed Ataulla is a journalist who covered Karnataka politics for over two decades and is former Political Editor of The Times of India.