ONE of the chief reasons perceived to have forced Deve Gowda to get Hegde expelled from the Janata Dal is the filing of a writ petition in the Karnataka High Court on June 11—the day the Prime Minister sought a vote of confidence in the Lok Sabha—seeking directives to the Karnataka government to act against Gowda on allegations of nepotism and misuse of power.
Much mystery is attached to the petition which is yet to be admitted by the court as the Karnataka Police Corps of Detectives (COD) report on the allegations attached along with the petition, was not legible. The petition was filed by Rama Murthy, an assistant purchase officer in Indian Telephone Industries. According to his advocate and BJP MLA Pramila Nesargi, the petition is considered by Gowda's supporters as a handiwork of Hegde, and an attempt to unsettle the Prime Minister.
As chief minister of Karnataka, Hegde had instituted a COD inquiry into allegations—made in the Legislative Council by BJP member B.B. Shivappa—that in 1984, Gowda, then PWD minister, had a role in the allotment of 57 residential sites to his relatives in Mysore from the City Improvement Trust Board (CITB). The COD report submitted in 1988 had found four of the six charges true. Gowda's son H.D. Revanna, now a minister in Karnataka, was found to have influ-enced engineers in the CITB to allot sites to benami persons and his associates, who were ineligible for the sites. Among the relatives were Gowda's daughter, his daughter-in-law, his sister-in-law, and his niece.
While Gowda had then denied the charges, saying they were motivated to ruin him politically, no action was taken on the report by either Hegde or successive governments. Though the excavation of the charges and the filing of the writ clearly point towards an attempt to dig out the skeletons in Gowda's cupboard, independent observers in Bangalore feel Gowda was stretching his paranoia to suspect Hegde's hand behind it.
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