Close on the heels of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah declaring that he would go ahead with the decision to set up the Anti-Corruption Bureau, the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and the Janata Dal (S) have written letters to Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi respectively, requesting them to direct the Chief Minister to withdraw the order on creation of the bureau.
In his letter to Ms. Gandhi, BJP State president Pralhad Joshi alleged that the ACB, which was aimed at weakening the Lokayukta institution, had been created in a hurry by the Chief Minister to protect himself from the charges of irregularities in denotification of land acquired for the formation of the Arkavathy Layout. He maintained that speculation was doing rounds that a report indicting the Chief Minister was about to be submitted to the Governor at any time by the authorities looking into a complaint related to the denotification issue.
Similarly, JD(S) State president H.D. Kumaraswamy, in his letter to Mr. Gandhi, hailed the Congress leader by stating that his single-minded determination had helped the passage of the Lokpal Bill in the Rajya Sabha in 2013. But the Congress government in Karnataka was violating the very principle of the Lokpal, he alleged.
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Meanwhile, the Chief Minister too has written to both Ms. Gandhi and Mr. Gandhi, clarifying on the issues related to formation of the ACB. In the letter, he has said that what had been done in Karnataka was in tune with the pattern prevailing in at least 12 other States.