Prajwal Revanna’s driver and BJP leader trade charges over leaked videos
Bengaluru (PTI): Prajwal Revanna’s former car driver Karthik and BJP leader G Devaraje Gowda accused each other of leaking the alleged sleaze videos of the JD(S) Hassan MP which has caused a big embarrassment to the regional party.
Prajwal is the grandson of former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda and nephew of former Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy. JD(S) suspended him today over the row.
The Karnataka government constituted a three-member Special Investigation Team (SIT) of IPS officers led by Additional Director General of Police B K Singh to probe the alleged sexual harassment of many women by Prajwal, who is said to be in Germany currently.
An FIR has already been registered against Prajwal as well as his father Revanna at the Holenarasipura police station in Hassan district for allegedly sexually harassing their former cook.
In a video message on social media, the driver said that he worked with Prajwal Revanna for the last 15 years but it has been a year since he has not been with him.
“The reason (for distancing from Prajwal) was that my land was taken away and my wife was beaten up. I was mentally tortured. Because my land was taken away, I came out of the job and started my fight (to get back land),” Karthik said in the message.
He said he had approached G Devaraje Gowda for justice as had been fighting against the Deve Gowda family.
Devaraje Gowda had fought the 2023 assembly election from Holenarasipura assembly constituency on the BJP ticket and lost to Revanna.
In the meantime, Prajwal Revanna had brought a stay order to prevent me from releasing any sleaze photos or videos, Karthik said.
“Devaraje Gowda told me to hand over the photos and videos which he promised to hand over to the judge to help vacate the stay. Trusting him, I gave him a copy, which he used,” the driver claimed.
“Other than Devaraje Gowda, I did not give this video to Congress leaders or anyone else. I did not give the videos and photos to Congress leaders because they were quite close to Prajwal. Hence, I approached Devaraje Gowda, but he too cheated me,” Karthik alleged.
Since the BJP and the JD(S) have forged an alliance, Karthik said Devaraje Gowda had written to his party high command not to give ticket to Prajwal pointing to his conduct.
Rejecting the charges, Devaraje Gowda told reporters here in Bengaluru that Karthik had been hanging around with the Congress Lok Sabha candidate from Hassan constituency Shreyas Patel.
He said that neither the JD(S) nor the BJP would release the videos as it would go against the NDA alliance's candidate.
“If there was someone benefiting from this, it was Congress. Only for his political gain, the Congress candidate (Shreyas Patel) has mortgaged the modesty of women seen in the videos,” Devaraje Gowda said.
He said he is waiting for the SIT to serve him a notice where he will release important documents. The BJP leader said the Congress leaders will fall in the ditch they had dug for others.
Let the Truth be known. If you read VB and like VB, please be a VB Supporter and Help us deliver the Truth to one and all.
Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
