Contestants for Sunday’s polls for the four-member administration committee of the century-old club gifted silver cups, wristwatches, laptop bags and the like to the members in search of votes.
Amid a dry summer, it rained gifts for the more than 2,000 members of the Karnataka State Secretariat Club. Contestants for Sunday’s polls for the four-member administration committee of the century-old club gifted silver cups, wristwatches, laptop bags and the like to the members in search of votes.
The situation was not much different from the one seen during national and state elections. Apart from distributing gifts, leaders of the main camps held gala parties for prospective voters and played the caste card too.
The major teams (or syndicates) involved in the battle for votes were headed by SN Krishna Kumar, deputy secretary in the revenue department (his brother TN Narayan Gowda is the present secretary of the club’s administration committee), and P Guruswamy, who is assistant to excise minister MP Renukacharya and is backed by Mahadevaiah Matapathi (president of the Secretariat Employees’ Association).
Asked about the gifts being distributed at the secretariat, both camps denied that any such thing had happened. The Matapathi-supported group was the first to print pamphlets highlighting the alleged groupism and lack of transparency in the current set-up. After seeing the pamphlets in the corridors of Vidhana Soudha, the group close to Kumar retaliated by pasting handwritten bills on noticeboards blasting the former group. Guruswamy said some people wanted to continue in their posts at any cost. “But we are ready to break the monopoly,” he said. “We raised the issue of cancelling the membership of rich Marwaris who were allotted membership illegally.”
Meanwhile, Kumar’s team promised the construction of a swimming pool and a ‘centenary hall, and free computer training for the club’s members.
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