Yeddy will be Reduced from Hero to Zero Like Keshubhai: Eshwarappa

From Our Special Correspondent
Daijiworld Media Network - Bangalore

Bangalore, Dec 21: Former Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa, who was made a hero by the Sangh Parivar and BJP workers, would be reduced to a zero after the ensuing State Assembly polls like Keshubhai Patel, who floated his own Gujarat Parivartan Party after quitting BJP, and bit the dust, predicted State BJP President K S Eshwarappa in Bangalore on Saturday.

Addressing reporters on the resounding hat-trick victory by BJP’s poster-boy Narendra Modi in the just concluded Gujarat Assembly polls, Eshwarappa said the Gujarat assembly polls should serve as a hard lesson to Yeddyurappa and his supporters.

While Yeddyurappa, who hails from the malnad district of Shimoga and claims the backing of his own Lingayat community disregarding the fact that the incumbent chief minister Jagadish Shettar, who also belongs to the same community and hails from the Hubli in the heart of northern Karnataka, served as Karnataka’s chief minister for hardly three and half years, Eshwarappa said Keshubhai had been chief minister of Gujarat twice and banked on the support of his own Patel community as against Modi, who belongs to the backward community.

But Keshubhai Patel’s GPP fared miserably and was able to win barely 2, including his own seat, the State Deputy Chief Minister said and cautioned Yeddyurappa and his supporters that similar fate awaited him too in the State.

Yeddyurappa’s Karnataka Janata Party (KJP), which was launche d at Haveri with all pomp, was sure to suffer a similar fate in the State after his exit from the BJP, Eshwarappa warned.

  “Yeddyurappa will be a disappointed man like Patel after the Karnataka Assembly elections as Gujarat poll results have shown that the electorate will not back those who claim that they are superior than the party,” Eshwarappa said a day after the Gujarat poll victory.

“The message from the Gujarat polls is that people would separate real heroes from zeroes and cut down to size the bloated egos of those who believe that they are bigger than the party.

Eshwarappa said the BJP victory in Gujarat was nothing but re-assurance of people’s support to a cadre-based organisation rather than individualistic and regional parties.

Pointing out that Patel was banking heavily on the support from his community of Patels, who accounted for 40 per cent of the Gujarat population, Eshwarappa said his defeat had shown that caste-based politics had no takers.

''Karnataka’s voters are too smart to teach a lesson to these paper tigers,”  he said.

However, Yeddyurappa maintained that the BJP’s Gujarat unit was nothing but a regional party.

“If it was a national party as being claimed by Eshwarappa, why none of the party’s central leaders actively campaigned in Gujarat,” he shot back.