A day after he was expelled from the party for abstaining from the trust vote in Karnataka assembly, N Mahesh, the sole Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) MLA, presented a bizarre reason to defend his absence.
Talking to reporters in Bengaluru, he claimed he didn’t know about BSP Supremo Mayawati’s orders asking him to vote in favour of the coalition government, because the order was given on Twitter and he was not on social media.
He further added that he was not available for the trust vote because he was meditating at the centre outside Bengaluru while the session was on. When asked if BSP leadership had tried to contact him over the phone about the orders to vote in favour of the coalition , he said, “I had switched off my phone.”
Ahead of the 2018 Assembly elections, the JD(S) had formed an alliance with the BSP. When the coalition government was formed, the sole BSP MLA Mahesh was inducted into the cabinet and he had served as the minister for primary education.
‘I Was Asked to Stay Neutral’
Defending his stand, Mahesh said he was asked to remain neutral by the party. In October 2018, after serving as a Cabinet minister for four months, on Mayawati’s orders he had resigned from the post. He said after this that he was asked to stay neutral.
“On 23 June, during a national-level meeting of the party, I asked Behenji (Mayawati), whether we should continue to support the JD(S). She asked me to stay independent and neutral. When I asked if I should sit in the opposition, she said no, you remain neutral. Following this, I spoke to the Speaker and got a special seat for the BSP in the Assembly,” he said.
He further added that when the trust vote process began, he spoke with Karnataka in-charge of the party, Ashok Siddarath. “When I asked him what I should do during the trust vote, he said asked me to keep neutral,” he said.
Since the party had ordered him to stay neutral, he said he went to his constituency.
Mayawati had put out a tweet on 21 July stating that she had directed her party MLA to support Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy in Tuesday’s trust vote.
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