It is game over for the Bharatiya Janata Party in Karnataka.
Merely seven days after he became the first BJP chief minister in South India, B S Yeddyurappa tendered his resignation to the governor at 5 pm on Monday.
Once again, it is Janata Dal-Secular chief H D Deve Gowda who is being blamed, with Yeddyurappa dubbing it the worst betrayal in his life.
West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya's proud boast that those who had earlier evicted his party's supporters from Nandigram had been paid back in their own coin recalls Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's recourse to Newtonian law - every action has an equal and opposite reaction - to explain the anti-Muslim pogrom in the state in 2002, which followed the burning of a train coach in which his party's kar sevaks were returning from Ayodhya.
Nor are these two observations any different in their callousness from Rajiv Gandhi's comment - the ground shakes when a big tree falls - in the aftermath of the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi after Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984.
What is immediately evident about remarks of this nature is the lack of remorse on the part of the speakers - chief ministers in two cases and a prime minister in one. To them, the deaths of individuals, many of them innocent women and children, as a result of the violence unleashed by their parties against specific targets are not to be greatly regretted because the assailants were merely retaliating against earlier acts of violence by certain groups.
However, when leaders in high positions articulate this medieval 'eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth' outlook, it provides post-facto justification for the crimes committed by their supporters.
That Bhattacharya is unrepentant about his virtual endorsement of the attacks carried out by armed Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) cadres against their political opponents in Nandigram is clear from his thrice repeated 'I stick by it' comment on his earlier 'paid in their own coin' statement during a press conference.
The distinction he has drawn between 'our supporters', who had been driven out from Nandigram several months ago, and their adversaries belonging mainly to the Trinamool Congress, the Socialist Unity Centre of India, the Jamiatul-ulema-e-Hind and Naxalite organisations also showed that he was speaking as a CPI-M leader rather than as chief minister.
Senior Congress leaders from Kerala maintained that it was for the congress high command to take a decision on the return of NCP leader K. Karunakaran to Congress.
The ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) in Kerala had given its ally Kerala Congress-Joseph an ultimatum to nominate a legislator in place of Kuruvilla, who resigned as public works minister.
Mons Joseph, 42, is a two-time legislator from Kaduthuruthy in Kottayam district and would be the new public works department minister.
The high power committee of the party 
met to decide between Surendran Pillai and Joseph. The decision was not an easy one with the five-member committee divided over the selection.
Kuruvilla replaced P.J. Joseph in September 2006 after the latter quit the cabinet over allegations that he misbehaved with a woman on board a Chennai-Kochi flight in August that year.
The party chairman was hoping against hope that he could return as minister after being exonerated in the case, which is now being probed by the Chennai police. But with the ultimatum from the LDF, Joseph succumbed to pressure and was forced to nominate a new minister in Mons Joseph.
What remains to be seen is the repercussions on the selection of Mons Joseph, as a section in the party led by Lok Sabha member P.C. Thomas had campaigned for Pillai as the next minister.
© bijuchandran's TOON
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