BALLARI: The year so far has been a roller-coaster ride for Kampli MLA JN Ganesh, who began 2019 at a resort in Bidadi, ended up in jail, got expelled from his party, landed in the hospital and is now out on bail.
Arrested for assaulting a fellow MLA, Anand Singh, Ganesh has not been to his constituency in three months now. But that is not the first thing on his list as he is aiming to secure forgiveness from Singh and revocation of his banishment from the Congress, not necessarily in that order.
On Saturday, Ganesh met senior leader Suryanarayana Reddy in Ballari. After the meeting he made an appeal to Singh, through the media, seeking a reconciliation. “Anand Singh is still my brother and he is angry with me. I hope everything will be fine and relations will be normal,” he said.
Ganesh is accused of attacking Singh while inebriated and hitting him with a bottle. The attack had left Singh hospitalised and Ganesh was on the run till his arrest in February. Ganesh himself, according to him, was hospitalised due to ill health and was discharged only on Friday.
But on Saturday, Ganesh sought to downplay the incident which he said was a ‘minor’ one. “There are people who committed major mistakes and got away with it. In my case, it was a minor incident, blown out of proportion by some people. I will not speak much about what happened in the resort,” Ganesh said, before adding, “Anand Singh knows me for the last 15 years and even today I respect him a lot. Even if he rejects me, I will continue to remain his brother.”
Interestingly, during his absence from Kampli, on account of his being on the run and then jailed, people in Kampli have firmly stood by his side and supported him. During the campaigning for the Lok Sabha elections, Congress leaders who visited Kampli were told to seek votes only after the safe return of Ganesh. When this was pointed out to Ganesh on Saturday, he acknowledged his absence and said that he would now work on improving his constituency.
The MLA is also hoping that his membership would be reinstated as the situation in the Congress had changed in the past three months. For this, he has turned to Suryanarayana for help. Heaping praise on Reddy, Ganesh said that he considered the senior leader to be his ‘political guru’ and that he would follow whatever advice Reddy gave him in the matter.