Siddaramaiah is visiting New Delhi on June 16

Daijiworld Media Network - Bengaluru (SP)

Bengaluru, Jun 16: Karnataka chief minister, Siddaramaiah, who had unsuccessfully tried to reorganize and reshuffle the ministry several times during the last two years, seems to have made up his mind this time to complete this exercise at any cost.

At a meeting of ministers held on Wednesday, he told them his plans to reorganize the ministry and asked the ministers to be prepared for the prospects of being asked to leave, as he has to accommodate several leaders to strengthen the government in the remaining two years to the run up to the assembly election. Although there were rumours that he would collect resignation letters from all the ministers, this did not happen presumably because of the opposition faced from some among them.

Siddaramaiah is leaving on Thursday for New Delhi to hold discussions with Congress national president, Sonia Gandhi on the proposed reorganization. If the high command gives its nod to his plan, the ministry reorganization will happen by June 20, otherwise it may get postponed by about two months, political pundits believe. Before meeting Sonia, Siddaramaiah will be holding meetings with other top leaders of the party. The list of leaders with whom the plans will be discussed are Mallikarjun Kharge, Oscar Fernandes, and Ahmed Patel.

As per the present schedule, Siddaramaiah will meet Sonia at 11 am on Friday. He will have to convince her of the compulsions for undertaking the exercise of revamping the ministry as soon as possible. Siddaramaiah is expected to present case to case situation like name of the ministers,need for them to be replaced or inducted, and why. By then, Sonia would have been briefed by other leaders in the high command, and might take a final decision about either permitting or not permitting this exercise.

If sources are to be believed, the ministers who might be axed are Baburao Chinchansur, Kimmane Ratnakar, Shamanur Shivashankarappa, Qamarul Islam, Parameshwar Naik, Shivaraj Tangadagi, Vinay Kumar Sorake, and Ambareesh.

Those who are likely to be inducted into the ministry on the base of eminence are Kagodu Thimmappa, Dr K Sudhakar, Basavaraj Rayareddy, Pramod Madhwaraj, Layout Krishnappa, Priyanka Kharge, H S Mallikarjun, and N A Harris. One among the three leaders, Rudrappa Lamani, Shivamurthy Nayak and N Y Gopalakrishna, may also enter the ministry this time.

Sonia is planning to go on tour of America for ten days from June 18. KPCC president, Dr G Parameshwar, will go to Germany on visit and come back on June 26. By then legislature session will begin. Therefore, if Sonia Gandhi decides to hold discussions with KPCC president or other state leaders before taking a final call, ministry reorganization will get postponed by a couple of months, it is believed.