“Bharatiya Janata Party leaders do not have the courage to come to me,” Governor H.R. Bhardwaj said here on Sunday.
He was replying to a question by presspersons on the BJP leaders’ demand that the Governor direct Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to drop Ministers D.K. Shivakumar and Roshan Baig, who are facing charges, from the Cabinet.
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“I’m not a rubber stamp, and if Chief Minister Siddaramaiah or anybody does anything wrong, I will not pardon them,” he said.
“However powerful the Chief Minister may be, I have demonstrated that I’m not a rubber stamp.... My term will be over, but political leaders will remain here and will be accountable,” he said.
About the agitation by activists of the Students Federation of India and the Democratic Youth Federation of India outside the gate of Tumkur University demanding restoration of the old logo of the university (The logo was changed when S.C. Sharma was Vice-Chancellor.), Mr. Bhardwaj said the students were wasting their time by staging protests. “What is there in the logo?” he said, and added, “I had approved the new logo”.
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Mr. Bhardwaj defended Dr. Sharma for approving award of Ph.D. degrees to six candidates who had done research only for eight months by saying that the media was making an issue out of it.