Bengaluru: Karnataka’s Council of Ministers, which met under the chairmanship of Dy CM DK Shivakumar on Thursday passed a resolution urging Governor Thawar Chand Gehlot to withdraw the show cause notice issued to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah asking him to defend his actions in the alleged unlawful allotment of 14 plots in the upscale Vijayanagar area in Mysuru by Mysore Urban Development Authority (MUDA).
The Council also urged the Governor to reject the request from activist TJ Abraham seeking his sanction under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, to prosecute the Chief Minister.
Shivakumar and Law Minister HK Patil told a media conference that the CM decided to stay away from the meeting not to influence the decision of the Council of Ministers.
While the Dy CM declined to share details of the future course of action in case the Governor went ahead with the grant of sanction, sources say the CM would move the high court challenging it.
The Council met a day the seven day deadline the Raj Bhavan gave the CM to respond to Abraham’s letter ended.
The Governor’s office received two complaints last week, one from a farmers organisation another from Abraham, drawing his attention to the MUDA scam.
Shivakumar said the government issued the show cause notice even after the Chief Secretary submitted a detailed report about the alleged scam in the allotment of plots, unlawfully, to many people.
The Opposition BJP, which has planned a weeklong padayatra to highlight the scam from August 3, has demanded Siddaramaiah’s resignation on his wife accepting 14 expensive plots in return for the MUDA taking over 3 acre 16 guntas of her land in a village on the city outskirts.
The Opposition BJP has accused the CM’s family of accepting pricey plots measuring 38,824 sq. ft in Mysuru, and sought to know from the CM if it was not an act of corruption.
The CM has maintained that he did not accept the MUDA plots when he was in power. The previous BJP regime formulated the land compensation scheme on a 50:50 ratio basis and allotted the plot in a lawful manner.
Siddaramaiah’s wife had owned 3 acre 16 guntas of land at Kesare village near Ring Road in Mysuru. The land came to her as a gift from her brother, Mallikarjun. The MUDA, however, took over the land in 1997 and carved out residential plots.
Though the government had launched a scheme in 2020 to compensate landowners on a 50:50 allotment basis in exceptional cases, there had been no cabinet decision.
