On Wednesday, senior Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh were in Bengaluru to oversee a special secret ballot election process within BJP MLAs from Karnataka to choose the next chief minister. The two candidates were D V Sadananda Gowda and Jagdish Shettar.
After B S Yeddyurappa resigned from the post in the wake of Karnataka Lokayukta Justice Santosh Hegde's report on illegal mining which indicted him among others, there was a tussle among two factions (the Yeddyurappa and Ananth Kumar camp) within the state BJP to appoint a new CM.
On each ballot, Jaitley and Singh both signed and asked each Karnataka BJP MLA to write his or her choice for the next CM.
Jaitley played the role of the returning officer of overseeing the procedure of voting, sources told rediff.com.
Till the time the MLA wrote his/her preferred name and dropped the ballot paper into a special box, Jaitely waited to read name of the next MLA.
Such was the strict democratic process that was followed in Bengaluru on Wednesday, probably introduced for the first time in any political party to elect its leader, sources added.
A special counting centre was formed once voting was over, and Jaitley announced to the gathering that Gowda got the majority of the votes.
Soon after that, Jaitely also requested the meeting to unanimously elect Gowda as the leader of the BJP legislative party.
