Devendra Fadnavis, who on Tuesday afternoon resigned from the chief minister’s post as the BJP was not in a position to form the government in Maharashtra, found himself at the receiving end of biting criticism from former Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy.
"I am sad to hear that Devendra Fadnavis has quit. Actually, I should have been the happiest man. Was it not he who gave everything to BJP to topple my government? Time takes care of everything,” Kumaraswamy said in a tweet on Tuesday afternoon, adding that the BJP is paying the price for being “power-hungry”.
HDK, as Kumaraswamy is popularly known, was referring to the dramatic period in Karnataka politics when14 Congress and three JDS MLAs were sequestered in Mumbai for a couple of months when they revolted against their parties, only to later join hands with the BJP. This move had eventually led to the collapse of the Kumaraswamy government in the state.
Fadnavis’s resignation came three days after a series of secret manoeuvres that snatched the reign of power from the Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress combine and saw him on CM’s chair. Forced to face a trust vote on the floor of the Maharashtra assembly on Wednesday to prove it had the majority, the BJP found itself wanting for numbers and decided to pull the plug on its bid for power.
The BJP had repeatedly asserted, till as late as Tuesday afternoon, that it would prove its majority, but the party’s claim of having 170 MLAs rested solely on NCP’s Ajit Pawar and his ability to get enough NCP MLAs to defect and support Fadnavis’s claim.
That prospect, however, failed to materialise as the canny older Pawar not only prevented the BJP from luring any more NCP lawmakers, but also got back almost all of the MLAs who had initially sided with Ajit Pawar.
On Saturday, HDK had termed the continuous twists in Maharashtra as opportunist politics and said no one in country's politics, including him, has morality left in them and can discuss about it.
Fadnavis and NCP leader Ajit Pawar had taken oath as the Maharashtra chief minister and deputy chief minister respectively on Saturday, an unexpected development a day after Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray emerged as the Sena-NCP-Congress' consensus candidate for the top post.
Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar, however, said it was his nephew Ajit Pawar's own decision, and not that of the party, to support the BJP to form the government.
Ajit Pawar's erstwhile political move to join hands with BJP to form a government was seen as a repetition of what Kumaraswamy did 13 years ago in Karnataka.
In 2006, Kumaraswamy had rebelled and walked out of the Congress-JD(S) coalition led by Dharm Singh with 46 MLAs, against the wish of his father and former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda, citing threat to the party, and formed the government with the BJP, becoming the chief minister during his very first term as MLA.
The current Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa was his deputy then. Under a rotational chief ministership arrangement, he helmed the state for 20 months. When the BJP's turn for chief ministership came, he reneged on the arrangement and brought down the Yediyurappa government within seven days.