After Shiv Sena Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut claimed on Tuesday that over 15 Shiv Sena MLAs have gone incommunicado together with Urban Development Minister Eknath Shinde after the Maharashtra Legislative Council outcomes on Monday night, many have pointed to the BJP’s notorious ‘Operation Lotus’ at play. The time period first shot to prominence when the JD(S)-Congress authorities fell in Karnataka as 15 legislators left the ruling alliance which had necessitated a no-confidence movement. Subsequently, the BJP went on to type the federal government, barely a 12 months after the JD(S)-Congress alliance had come to energy.
What is Operation Kamal/Lotus?
In latest years, ‘Operation Kamal or Lotus’ has been repeatedly utilized by Opposition events after the BJP allegedly orchestrated profitable campaigns, together with poaching, to interchange an elected Opposition-ruled authorities halfway with their very own leaders, like within the case of Karnataka, Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh. Soon after the Karnataka debacle, then-Congress chief and Supreme Court advocate Brijesh Kallapa had tweeted, “Operation Kamal was pioneered and perfected in Karnataka, however BJP’s present ‘honest’ Leadership beneath Narendra Modi has taken it to a number of States together with Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh; Goa, Manipur, Gujarat and Meghalaya.
However, the time period was coined by somebody from the BJP itself again in 2008 Karnataka Assembly elections. Former Karnataka minister G. Janardhana Reddy was stated to have devised a brand new technique to push the get together previous the majority-mark by engineering mass-defections from the opposition and securing assist from Independents.
In 2020, Madhya Pradesh witnessed an identical growth whereby the mass resignation of twenty-two MLAs had resulted within the stepping down of Congress Chief Minister Kamal Nath, 15 months after he had come to energy. Several Congress legislators resigned quickly after senior Congress chief Jyotiraditya Scindia joined BJP.
On the opposite hand, ‘Operation Kamal’ has additionally backfired in lots of circumstances, as was witnessed within the West Bengal Legislative Assembly elections final 12 months. Scores of TMC ministers and leaders together with Mukul Roy, Suvendu Adhikari, Rajib Banerjee had converted to the BJP camp within the months main as much as the election. However, the BJP ended up fielding many TMC defectors, who had been, in flip, denied tickets by the ruling get together in a bid to diffuse the anti-incumbency issue.
Source: www.financialexpress.com”