Sonia to Siddu, DKShivkumar: Patch up for sake of Congress

By Shyam Sundar Vattam | NT

Bengaluru: Worried over the differences of opinion between Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Siddaramaiah and KPCC President D.K.Shivakumar, AICC President Sonia Gandhi and her son, Rahul Gandhi are learnt to have advised the Karnataka leaders to bury the hatchet and fight unitedly to capture power in Karnataka in 2023.

At the recently held threeday Chintan Shivir in Udaipur, the Gandhis spoke to the leaders separately to know what their issues were as they have been giving contradictory statements on several issues. They had continued to cross swords despite the high command asking them not to do so. This has also led to factionalism in the party.

The internal bickering came to the fore when Shivakumar claimed that BJP Higher Education Minister Dr.C.N.Ashwath Narayana met KPCC Campaign Committee Chairman M.B.Patil, known to be close to the former CM, to make a request not to raise the scams pertaining to his departments. This led to a virtual war of words between Shivakumar and Patil.

When former Mandya MP Ramya aka Divya Spandana tweeted in support of Patil, supporters of Shivakumar attacked her wonderng where she was all these days? The verbal attack on Patil was expected as he is identified with the Siddaramaiah camp and had even stayed away from the Mekedatu padayatra.

During the plenary session, AICC General Secretary and In-charge of Karnataka, Randeep Singh Surjewala called both Shivakumar and Patil, and asked them to forget the past as their fight would be taken advantage of by BJP leaders. Delhi leaders are aware of the fact that Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar are both after the CM’s post. The KPCC President is known to get irritated when asked to react to statements of Siddaramaiah followers that their leader must become the next CM. Shivakumar has been a loyal soldier of the party who stood by the Gandhi family in their hour of crisis while Siddaramaiah joined the Congress pretty late but was lucky enough to become CM. Shivakumar has been nursing the ambition of becoming CM for a long time and is not sure if it will happen seeing the groundswell of support for Siddaramaiah, said sources.