Deve Gowda says no to Siddaramaiah’s suggestion for supplementary budget

Janata Dal (Secular) chief H D Deve Gowda says chief minister H D Kumaraswamy won’t be wrong in presenting a full budget.

Janata Dal (Secular) chief H D Deve Gowda on Thursday rejected former Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah’s suggestion that the state’s coalition government present a supplementary budget, citing a parliamentary precedent involving him as the prime minister.

“I do not want to criticise Siddaramaiah’s suggestion. He has presented several budgets before, but the Chief Minister (H D Kumaraswamy) is not doing anything new. There is a parliamentary precedence. It is appropriate for a new government to present a budget than a supplementary,” he told news agency PTI in an interview in Bengaluru.

Gowda cited the budget of July 22, 1996 to back his argument. “I was heading the United Front government as prime minister and [P] Chidambaram was the finance minister, as the Congress had given outside support. The then coalition government had presented a full-fledged budget and it was called a ‘dream budget’. Did the Congress’s shine vanish by presenting a new budget?” he said.

“Since the Congress had given outside support to my government, I had to accommodate their schemes in the budget. I did it due to coalition compulsions,” he said.

Kumaraswamy, who is Gowda’s son, has said that he will not discontinue any programmes of the previous Congress government to ensure the government runs smoothly. Siddaramaiah, however, had been pitching for a supplementary budget, instead of Kumaraswamy’s suggestion for a new budget, said Gowda.

Gowda said a fresh budget was needed for the new government to send a message to the state’s people. A supplementary budget will not be able to incorporate schemes the Congress and the JD(S) had promised during assembly elections.

The two parties contested elections separately but came together to form a coaltion government after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s government failed to proved its majority and fell in three days in May.

Gowda pinned hopes on senior Congress leaders, including Karnataka affairs in-charge K C Venugopal, for resolving issues cropping up in the coalition.

The budget session of the state Assembly is scheduled to commence on July 5.

On B S Yeddyurappa’s secret meeting with BJP president Amit Shah in Ahmedabad, the former prime minister said he did not want to assume what transpired between the two, but added that as per reports, they were not in a mood to destabilise the JD(S)-Congress government in Karnataka.

Asked if he was satisfied with the coalition government, Deve Gowda said, “All these difficulties crop up in the initial stages and later subside. In the present circumstances, both the parties must realise that to run a smooth government, communal forces would have to be kept at bay.”