IT Dept Raids Karnataka Minister Hosting Gujarat Congress MLAs

BENGALURU:
Tax officials raided multiple properties linked to DK Shivakumar, a top minister in Karnataka who is hosting a group of party legislators from Gujarat to avoid a break in their ranks ahead of a close Rajya Sabha election.
This has created angry responses from the Congress, which accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of carrying out “an unprecedented witch-hunt”. Party leaders raised the issue in Parliament, leading to a brief adjournment in proceedings in the Rajya Sabha or the upper house.
The Congress has accused the BJP of using “money and muscle power” to engineer defections among its legislators in Gujarat, where senior party leader Ahmed Patel is seeking re-election to the Rajya Sabha, on August 8.
But the government said the ‘Eagleton – The Golf Village’, where the Gujarat legislators were camping, had not been raided. Finance minister Arun Jaitley told Parliament that only Shivakumar, who was trying to “hide behind the cover” of the lawmakers at the resort, had been questioned.
The Congress had sent 44 of its legislators to a resort outside Bengaluru to fend off poaching attempts by the BJP ahead of the August 8 Rajya Sabha polls in Gujarat.
Of the 57 Congress MLAs in the state, from where senior party leader Ahmed Patel is contesting, six resigned from the party in the last two days with three of them joining the BJP. It was for the safety and security of the MLAs who are being threatened if they do not agree to switch sides, that is why we decided to bring them to Bengaluru, Congress leaders said.