Former prime minister and Janata Dal-Secular president H D Deve Gowda welcomed the dissolution of the Karnataka state assembly.
He blamed the Bharatiya Janata Party for not responding to his letter dated November 1 addressed to BJP president Rajnath Singh. "I am enclosing a 12-point Memorandum of Understanding that will act as a vital foundation for smooth and cordial functioning of the BJP-led government in Karnataka," he had said in his letter.
He said his MLAs waited for 12 days before he decided enough was enough. "The Delhi media has been projecting me and my son in bad light. First, they said we had differences over property. Then came the story that we have united. It is the media that was creating its own stories. I am distributing a set of documents that clearly show it was the BJP that first made use of the judicial paper almost twenty months back," he said.
He lost his temper a couple of times when some inconvenient questions were posed.
"Please do not indulge in loose talk with a former prime minister. Otherwise, the paper you have would not be there," he said to a journalist who merely repeated the charge that Gowda could not be trusted. Minutes later he was saying almost the same thing to another journalist.
Gowda said there was nothing wrong with his policy of maintaining equidistance from the Congress and the BJP as he had done in 1999.
"Some people had written off H D Deve Gowda but I came back with a vengeance. I am going to do the same in the forthcoming state assembly elections," he said.
He denied the reports that soon after his arrival in New Delhi on Monday evening he met Congress leaders and held discussions with them.
"I have not met Madam [Sonia] Gandhi or any other Congress leader. I do not know when the elections would be held because it for those in power to decide. Both the JD-S and the BJP want assembly polls," former prime minister said.
He appealed to the electorate of Karnataka not to give a fractured mandate and return a single party to power.