By Express News Service
BENGALURU: The saga of 'missing' Congress MLAs Anand Singh and Pratap Gowda Patil ended with the duo being sworn in on Saturday. The absence of the two MLAs had attracted considerable attention with the Congress accusing the Centre of abducting them.
Though the legislators were absent in the morning session, they appeared during the post-noon session and were among the last to be administered oath.
During their absence when they were said to be staying at the Gold Finch Hotel, tension prevailed in the Congress over them being poached by the BJP leading to party leaders H M Revanna and D K Suresh rushing to the venue to issue them the whip. However, only Patil was staying at the hotel and police officials, including the DG&IGP and the city police commissioner, prevented the leaders from meeting him. Later, Patil was brought to Vidhana Soudha under police protection while Singh arrived from some undisclosed location.
A senior police officer said, "We rushed to the hotel after receiving an alert of that Congress MLAs were lodged there and there was a commotion. As per Supreme Court order, our duty is to provide security to the MLAs and bring them to the Assembly. But after a thorough search, we found only Maski (Raichur) MLA Pratap Gowda Patil and could not find Vijayanagar MLA Anand Singh. We did not allow any political party leaders to meet them."
