Express News Service
NEW DELHI: His quick-footed move to bury the hatchet with his former mentor HD Deve Gowda gave the Congress, fighting with its back to the wall, another chance in the game. This it did by agreeing to project the third runner-up HD Kumaraswamy as CM candidate. Before that, the day was filled with rumours of imminent splits, defections, a naughty Kerala Tourism advertisement inviting Karnataka MLAs to its resorts, and old Arun Jaitley tweets being quoted by the Congress.
Even the heavens felt the heat of post-counting politics was too much to bear and sent in the rains.
The Congress worker, a rare species elsewhere in the country, was not quite celebrating with drums and colours as the BJP workers were in front of the party’s mall-like headquarters, but they were celebrating nonetheless. “We’ve done well in Bengaluru (15 seats). BJP’s taken the state, but we form the government,” said one of them, surprisingly also telling this writer the exact number of seats that would come to the Congress kitty, 78.
This was a little after mid-day, when the counting was still on. For the BJP, the tide had turned but not quite as much as it would have liked. Yeddy, who had even announced the date of the swearing-in, and was to leave for the Parliamentary Board meeting in Delhi, had to wait for a reverse traffic, of three heavyweights from Delhi, the likes of Piyush Goyal and JP Nadda, to clinch it for him.
The BJP lotus, meanwhile, has undergone a change in wall graffiti, it’s taken on the tricolour, shedding off the deep saffron. Probably an inclusive message that was not so much visible during the campaign, but in the number of seats it picked up across the state, in almost all the regions, particularly central Karnataka.
