Ex-Karnataka CM remanded to judicial custody till Oct 22 as Lok Ayukta court rejects bail plea.
In a major embarrassment to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party’s first chief minister in south India and former Karnataka chief minister BS Yeddyurapa was jailed Saturday after a court rejected his bail plea and ordered his arrest. He has been remanded to judicial custody till October 22.
Yeddyurappa, 68, was taken into custody by the police after he surrendered before Lok Ayukta special court judge NK Sudhindra Rao, who earlier rejected his bail plea in two graft cases and issued an arrest warrant.
Yeddyuappa’s arrest happened after high drama and confusion as he was not present in the court when his bail plea was rejected.
He had sent a medical certificate saying he was suffering from back pain. He was not at his official residence on Race Course Road in the city centre when the police came armed with the warrant to arrest him. The police also searched for him in vain at his private residence in south Bangalore, leading to speculation that he might have either got admitted to a hospital or taken shelter in a ‘math’ (religious complex). Over four hours after the judge ordered his arrest, Yeddyurappa turned up at the court and surrendered.
Yeddyurappa, 68, was taken to Bangalore’s main jail at Prappana Agrahara in the eastern suburbs, where will have the company of his former ministerial colleagues Katta Subramanaya Naidu and SN Krishnaiah Shetty. Shetty was also arrested Saturday as his bail plea in the two cases was rejected.
Yeddyurappa is the first accused in five cases of illegal land denotification (freeing from government control). The cases were filed by two Bangalore advocates Sirajin Basha and NK Balaraj in January this year after Governor HR Bhardwaj gave them sanction to launch criminal proceedings against Yeddyurappa and his kin for conspiring to denotify lands in and around Bangalore in return for monetary gains.
Yeddyurappa’s two sons, BJP Lok Sabha member BY Raghavendra and BY Vijayendra, and son-in-law R Sohan Kumar were granted conditional bail. Yeddyurappa had quit on July 31 this year after the then Lok Ayukta (ombudsman) N Santosh Hegde recommended his trial for graft in an illegal land mining scam.
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