The room was full of multi-coloured receipt bundles, almost knee-high. Check post receipts, this reporter asked. He nodded and added with his characteristic sardonic smile: “They are all fake.”
Those receipts, collected by Indian Forest Service officer Dr U V Singh and his team, were seized from more than 20 check posts through which dumpers transported illegally extracted iron ore from mines in Ballari to the Belekeri port in Ankola. Nearly 35 lakh tonnes of iron ore seized from those dumpers and kept at the port was stolen and shipped abroad.
Singh was assisting Lokayukta Justice Santosh Hegde to investigate the biggest-ever illegal iron ore mining scam in India, which directly impacted the GDP. Justice Hegde called the operation the “Republic of Ballari”.
Gali Janardhana Reddy, the tourism minister who dictated terms and almost overthrew the BJP’s first-ever government in South India, was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in a case registered in Andhra Pradesh. The then Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Konijeti Rosaiah had recommended it.
Reddy was accused of having “blown” the Suggalamma temple which served as the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. This allowed his company to illegally mine in Karnataka using the Andhra Pradesh permit.
The Supreme Court-appointed Centrally Empowered Committee’s (CEC) work on the scam led to a mining ban so that a “fool-proof system for the next three decades can be put in place,” a bureaucrat had told this reporter then.
This epic scandal annulled the sympathy Yediyurappa garnered after being denied power in the previous 20:20 coalition government with the JDS.
Yediyurappa worked to get the support of the SC Left Sect (Madiga) sub-sects, always sidelined by the powerful Right Sect in Congress. He told the sub-sects, organise your community to support the Lingayat candidate from our party. He would ensure Lingayats supported their community candidate in the reserved constituencies. For the first time, the Congress did not win a majority of the seats in reserved constituencies. The party is yet to regain the total support of the Left Sect.
His friendly-foe H N Ananthkumar’s and his efforts got them three less than the required 113 of the 224 seats to form the government in 2008. Reddy deployed Operation Kamala, an innovation to get around the anti-defection law that the BJP now routinely employs – promise position and pelf to strong opposition MLAs, get them to resign, finance their re-election and add their numbers to form the government.
On becoming chief minister, Yediyurappa was kept running around like a firefighter with an extinguisher. Reddy and his coterie demanded their pound of flesh and began a campaign to remove Yediyurappa using Minister Shobha Karandlaje’s so-called high-handedness.
Yediyurappa posted IAS officer Amlan Aditya Biswas, who had put a stop to illegal sand mining in Chitradurga, to Ballari. The televised dressing down that Biswas gave to Reddy coterie member Sanna Fakirappa, then BJP MP from Raichur, was epic.
But by that time, the state was stinking of corruption. The 2009 Lok Sabha election was called the “kempu note” poll (the Rs 1,000 note was red in colour those days). The voter had tasted the dumping of money in 2008 and they were not prepared to accept anything less than a couple of Rs 1,000 notes.
Yediyurappa was accused of denotification of land for cash, including a minister’s ancestral house. He made his resignation a show of strength by walking to the Raj Bhavan accompanied by over 70 Lingayat MLAs. Just ahead of his 23-day jail term, then party state president D V Sadananda Gowda was appointed as chief minister.
Gowda tried to project a “clean” image and in his very first press conference, announced that his family would not interfere in administration.
“This is the first time in three and a half years that we were able to have a proper interaction in the cabinet on every subject listed in the agenda,” a minister had told this reporter.
Yediyurappa worked to replace Gowda with Jagdish Shettar but it was a lame-duck government. Yediyurappa’s love-hate relationship with Ananthkumar led to his walking out of the BJP to launch the Karnataka Janata Paksha (KJP). By then, Congress leader Siddaramaiah was conducting his padayatra from Bengaluru to Ballari.
(The writer is a senior journalist based in Bengaluru)