7 hours ago
Bengaluru stampede: Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah summoned to Delhi to meet Congress high command
Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah was summoned to Delhi for a meeting with the Congress high command to discuss the recent stampede outside M Chinnaswamy stadium in Bengaluru that left 11 people dead.
According to the Chief Minister's Office, Siddaramaiah will be in Delhi on Tuesday for the meeting. The meeting gains significance as the state government is under fire from various quarters following the tragic incident.
Opposition parties have demanded that Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar resign from their posts by taking moral responsibility for the incident. However, both leaders have dismissed the demands.
Speculations are rife that the high command could ask some key ministers to step down from the Cabinet by taking moral responsibility for the stampede that happened during a felicitation ceremony for the Indian Premier League-winning Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) team.
The Karnataka government, it can be recalled, suspended former Bengaluru city police commissioner B Dayananada and other officials a day after the incident. MLC K Govindaraju was also sacked from the post of political secretary to the chief minister, as he was blamed for pushing for the celebrations in the city.
Siddaramaiah is expected to meet top party leaders along with Shivakumar, who is already in Delhi. The latter is in the national capital to visit a solid waste management plant run by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi.
Apart from the loss of face suffered by the government for organising a felicitation ceremony for the RCB team at Vidhana Soudha despite opposition by the police, the two are also expected to finalise the list of four MLC candidates, said sources. The four seats have been vacant for six months now.
The meeting also comes ahead of a second special Cabinet meeting convened to discuss the Socio-economic and Educational Census, which was placed before the state Cabinet in April this year.
