JD(S) 'lost people's goodwill' by allying with Congress after 2018 Karnataka polls, says HD Kumaraswamy

Bengaluru: JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy on Saturday said joining hands with the Congress and forming coalition government with the party has destroyed the goodwill that he had earned from the people of the state and maintained for 12 years. The former chief minister accused Congress leader Siddaramaiah of a conspiracy, as he stated that even BJP had not “betrayed” him to that level. Hitting back, Siddaramaiah said Kumaraswamy was an “expert in lying” and that “shedding tears was his family’s culture”. “The goodwill that I had earned from the people of the state in 2006-07 (as CM) and which I had maintained for 12 years despite the big campaign against me for not transferring power to BJP, everything got destroyed by joining hands with the Congress,” Kumaraswamy said. Speaking to reporters in Mysuru, he said he should not have joined hands with Congress which had campaigned against the JD(S) calling it BJP’s ‘B team’, but because of party supremo H D Deve Gowda’s insistence he agreed to form the coalition government. “It has now led to my party losing its strength….I fell to the trap, to emotional feelings of Deve Gowda because of which my party that had won 28-40 seats independently in the last three elections is suffering, " he said. He maintained that joining with Congress was the reason for the downfall of his party and his personal goodwill. Kumaraswamy however clarified that he was not blaming Gowda for it, as he knows and respects his father’s lifelong commitment towards secular identity. With no party getting a clear majority in the 2018 Assembly polls, Congress-JD(S), which had fought against each other during the election, joined hands to form a government with Kumaraswamy as chief minister, to keep BJP out of power. However following the rout in the Lok Sabha polls, which both parties fought in alliance, internal differences cropped up and due to rebellion by some MLAs the coalition government collapsed last year, and since then Congress and JD(S) leaders have been blaming each other for it. Siddaramaiah in his rebuttal asked if there was a goodwill for Kumaraswamy to blame Congress for him losing it. “Kumaraswamy is an expert in lying, he can lie according to the situation for the sake of politics…was making him Chief Minister despite JD(S) having 37 seats our fault? Shedding tears is the culture of the Deve Gowda family, nothing new in it, they can shed for appeasement or to make someone believe,” he added. Kumaraswamy, while responding to Siddaramaiah’s recent statement that there is always an internal understanding between JD(S) and BJP citing his meetings with Yediyurappa twice in the last couple of months, said the CLP leader should stop making such baseless allegations. “I meet openly, not in disguise…don’t I know whom he (Siddaramaiah) met recently?” Kumaraswamy said, adding that if he had such an understanding with the BJP he would have continued as the Chief Minister. BJP and JD(S) had earlier formed a coalition government in 2006 with Kumaraswamy as chief minister and Yediyurappa as his deputy, under a power-sharing formula of 20 months each. However, the government had collapsed as JD(S) did not transfer power to BJP, which later went on to win the next Assembly elections and form its first ever government in the south.