Anant Kumar, general secretary of Bharatiya Janata Party in Karnataka, has announced that his party would go it alone in Karnataka in the ensuing state assembly polls that are likely to be held in the last week of April.
Most of the party's legislators of the outgoing assembly have told the central leadership that it would be in the interest of the party to go alone rather than contest elections in alliance with other parties.
Kumar made it clear that the party would be led by former Karnataka chief minister B S Yediyurappa. "We worked for more than ten years when he was the state unit chief and I was its general secretary. I would be working with him during the elections," he said.
Arun Jaitley, BJP in-charge of Karnataka, will hold a meeting with the state leadership and former MLAs to chalk out a strategy for the elections. According to sources, the Election Commission is likely to announce two-phase elections that would be completed before end of April. Till then, the process of delimitation would be frozen.
"We would increase our vote share from 28 per cent to 32 per cent; that would help us to win over 130-140 seats in the assembly elections," Kumar said. He praised Yediyurappa for presenting two brilliant budgets and for writing off loans of farmers, weavers and fishermen worth around Rs 2,000 crores.