Thaindian News

New Delhi, June 17 (IANS) Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader B.S. Koshiyari Wednesday resigned as a Rajya Sabha member in what appeared to be his last-ditch attempt to pressurise the party to remove B.C. Khanduri as the Uttarakhand chief minister.
“I have resigned as member of the Rajya Sabha. I have sent my resignation to the chairman,” Koshiyari, a former chief minister, told reporters here.

He has been camping in Delhi for over a week, sources said, to press for the dismissal of Khanduri. The chief minister had already quit taking moral responsibility for the poll debacle but the party leadership is yet to accept it.

Vowing to rejuvenate the party in the hill state, Koshiyari said: “I will work as an ordinary worker to revive the party and steer it to victory in the 2012 assembly elections.”

Revolt against Khanduri has been brewing after the party’s debacle in the Lok Sabha elections where it lost all the five seats in the state. In 2004, the BJP had won three seats.

Party sources said Koshiyari and 10 legislators had written a letter to BJP president Rajnath Singh demanding that the chief minister be ousted. The legislators are blaming Khanduri for the party’s rout in Uttarakhand.

While the 10 MLAs have sounded the bugle of dissent, several others among the party’s 34 state legislators are ready to follow suit, a BJP insider said.

The 68-member Uttarakhand assembly also has 19 Congress members, seven of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), three from the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal (UKD) and four Independents.