The BJP will decide on disciplinary action against its Karnataka MLA and former minister Basanagouda Patil Yatnal – he has been reported to the party high command for attacking party leaders and ministers in recent days – after an ongoing meeting of the BJP national executive, Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai said in New Delhi on Monday. “We have reported the remarks to the party leadership. The leadership is aware of all this. We had given notices in the past and he had been quiet for a year. Now he has spoken again about a few issues. Nirani (senior minister Murugesh Nirani) has also spoken. Our party president has spoken to the party leaders and has sent a report. We will decide on the issue after the national executive meeting,” Bommai said, even as Yatnal denied reports of a fresh notice to him. The BJP in Karnataka has found itself in a spot over the last week with the BJP MLA and senior minister Murugesh Nirani indulging in a war of words and hitting below the belt. Yatnal has also attacked former CM B S Yediyurappa and his son B Y Vijayendra in the past. “There is a pimp minister and he is doing the work of a pimp. It is his business,” Yatnal said during a protest by Panchamasali Lingayats last week for reservations under OBC quotas. Both Yatnal and Nirani are incidentally Panchamasalis and are vying to emerge as the foremost leaders of the sub-sect of Lingayats – one of the most dominant communities in the state. Reacting to the remark, industries minister Nirani, who is a wealthy businessman-politician, sounded a warning to Yatnal. “If he does not control his tongue, then there will come a time when his tongue will have to be cut off. If he is born to his father let him withdraw a stay order he has obtained. He had a driver called Kumar earlier. He was murdered. Why was he murdered? Let him explain. If he has no respect for the party then why is he in the party, let him get out,” Nirani said. Yatnal has also questioned police actions under the BJP government and has suggested that raids carried out in 2020 by the Bengaluru police on film actresses and other celebrities for drug usage had ulterior motives other than a crackdown on the drug mafia. “The raids on actresses (in 2020) were not about drugs. Using the excuse of drugs, it was an exercise to delete videos of the son of a prominent person. The police seized the electronic devices of the heroines and obtained the videos and then deleted them,” Yatnal said Sunday. “It was not a campaign against drugs but an attempt to delete controversial videos of leaders,” Yatnal had told reporters earlier this week. Despite his frequent outbursts against the BJP government, Yatnal has rarely been reprimanded by the BJP, suggesting that he is being supported from within the BJP leadership. This was a cause of anger for former chief minister Yediyurappa when he was in power. Before Yediyurappa was asked to step down as CM in July 2021 and was replaced by Bommai, Yatnal had predicted that the BJP leadership would replace Yediyurappa with a “leader who is honest, pro-Hindu and capable of bringing the party to power in the next polls”. Saying that he is not worried by the latest prospect of disciplinary action against him, Yatnal has claimed that he is speaking in the interest of the future of the BJP and the national interest. “I will be meeting the national leaders. The national president J P Nadda will be in Karnataka on January 21. I will seek an appointment. I am not afraid of the small rowdies over here. Yatnal cannot be finished off. Yatnal has played a role in building the BJP in Karnataka and that is his strength,” the former union minister and MLA from Vijayapura said, amid the Nirani group’s threats to expose him in his legislative constituency ahead of the 2023 state polls.
