BENGALURU: Despite a contingent of 104 MLAs, the highest any opposition has had in the legislative assembly, the

appears to lack grit to take on the coalition government.

One reason is that the party is a house divided. Currently legislators are identified with one of four camps led either by opposition leader BS Yeddyurappa,

or the party’s second rung leaders including CT Ravi and V Sunil Kumar.

“With our regional diversity, there is no unifying factor to argue issues in a single voice,” Kumar Bangarappa, Soraba MLA, said. “For example, the coastal districts will not join hands with south Karnataka on Cauvery protests, while south Karnataka leaders have reservations supporting Mahadayi protests. These diversities do put pressure on the party.”

At the recently concluded Belagavi session, the BJP appeared at odds when youngsters in the party wanted to defeat the supplementary budget bill, a finance bill. The party had more legislators in the house than the ruling coalition at that point and could have defeated the bill by 10 votes, but the BJP decided to stage a walkout which resulted in an ugly confrontation between second rung leaders and seniors. Yeddyurappa was not in the house and Eshwarappa took the decision to walk out. It proved “highly unpopular”.

When questioned over the walkout, Jagadish Shettar, former speaker and chief minister, said: “Considering BJP is a national party, we had to maintain parliamentary ethics which states that a finance bill should never be defeated. Furthermore, the supplementary budget had an allocation of Rs 2,500 crore for farm loan waivers and the BJP would have been perceived as being antifarmer if we had attempted to defeat it.”

Ashwath Narayan Gowda, Malleswaram MLA, claimed the assembly session only saw “an increase in rhetoric politics”. The other complaint by BJP legislators is that senior leaders hog the most time during a legislative session and they concentrate only on “popular” sentiments.

Justifying reasons for seniors hogging the limelight, political analyst Mahadev Prakash says that barring Yeddyurappa, there is a serious dearth of pan-Karnataka leadership.