BSY rejig: Reddy faction takes hit

Seven ministers,including the Reddy brothers from Bellary,stayed away from a Cabinet meeting.

Seven ministers,including the Reddy brothers from Bellary,stayed away from a Cabinet meeting here on Tuesday to express displeasure against a Cabinet reshuffle initiated by Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa.

The reshuffle is likely to see the group led by the Reddy brothers,who last November commanded the support of as many as 40 of the 121 BJP MLAs,losing significant ground in the Cabinet to the Yeddyurappa faction. On Tuesday,the group in all numbered only around 15 MLAs when they boycotted the Cabinet meeting and met separately at the residence of Rural Development Minister Jagadish Shettar.

As part of the reshuffle,Yeddyurappa has dropped three ministers including two who were brought into the government by the Reddys. Six new ministers will be sworn in on Wednesday including Yeddyurappas close associates Shoba Karandlaje and V Somanna.

Karandlaje,the only woman in Yeddyurappas Cabinet,was dropped in November last year as a trade-off for Yeddyurappas continuance following an attempted political coup by the Reddy brothers.

Among the ministers who were dropped on Tuesday was Sports Minister Goolihatti Shekhar,an Independent MLA roped in by the Reddys to push the BJP from the 110 seats mark to the 113 simple majority mark after the May 2008 assembly polls.

Libaries Minister Shivanagouda Naik,who quit as a JDS MLA and successfully became a BJP MLA at the instance of the Reddy brothers to make the BJP comfortable has also been dropped along with Higher Education Minister Arvind Limbavalli,who is considered close to senior BJP leader Ananth Kumar.

Before being dropped,all the three ministers gravitated to the Reddys camp to join Infrastructure and Tourism Minister G Janardhan Reddy,Revenue Minister G Karunakar Reddy,Health Minister B Sreeramulu and Rural Development Minister Jagadish Shettar.

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The three ministers were dropped despite G Janardhan Reddy earlier in the day echoing senior party leader Ananth Kumars stand that the Cabinet should remain undisturbed and that only the three vacancies in the 34-member ministry should be filled up.

Yeddyurappa ignored calls for maintaining status quo in the ministry after the BJP high command cleared his proposal for induction of six new ministers to balance caste and loyalty equations in the first BJP government in south India.

Apart from the CMs personal choices of Karandlaje and Somanna,who are from the dominant Vokkaliga and a Lingayat castes,the four other new ministers are expected to be C C Patil,S A Ramdas,A Narayanaswamy and C H Vijayashankar. They are from the Lingayat,Brahmin,Scheduled Caste and OBC communities.