Ending days of speculation, former Minister C.H. Vijayshankar resigned from the BJP on Saturday.
Mr. Vijayshankar, also a former MP representing Mysuru in the Lok Sabha, has submitted his resignation to the party’s State unit president B.S. Yeddyurappa. Sources said the resignation letter was faxed to Mr. Yeddyurappa.
However, Mr. Vijayshankar has not spelt out which political party he will be joining, though it is rumoured that he is planning to join the Congress.
The former Minister had been nursing a grouse against the party leadership for denying him the ticket to contest from Mysuru during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. He had expressed his anguish over a “conspiracy hatched within the party” to deny him a ticket to contest from Periyapatna Assembly constituency in the coming Assembly elections.
After fielding him against former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda in Hassan during the last Lok Sabha elections, Mr. Vijayshankar said the party leaders were “conspiring to make him a sacrificial lamb” by asking him to contest against Chief Minister Siddaramaiah in Chamundeshwari Assembly constituency.
Though he claimed that he did not wish to quit the BJP, he claimed the party leaders had created circumstances that forced him to tender his resignation. He said he took a “painful decision” to quit the BJP to survive in politics.
Mr. Vijayshankar, who had been appointed as the BJP’s State Raitha Morcha president, said he had been nursing Periyapatna Assembly constituency after informing party leaders, including Mr. Yeddyurappa, following his debacle in the last Lok Sabha elections. But, certain sections of the party were making efforts to field an “industrialist from Bengaluru” from Periyapatna and spite him, he alleged.
Mr. Vijayshankar had dropped broad hints of resigning from the BJP when he failed to turn up for the farmers’ convention of Mysuru and Chamarajanagar district addressed by Mr. Yeddyurappa in Mysuru on Thursday. On Wednesday, he had made himself scarce when party leader Shobha Karandlaje tried to meet him in Mysuru in an apparent bid to retain him in the party.
