Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah’s diamond studded Swiss watch finally gets some rest at the cabinet hall in Vidhana Soudha. After all, it did consume a lot of the state government’s time over the past few weeks.
Siddaramaiah’s highly valued watch landed in the eye of the storm after JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy passed a remark—at the Vidhana Soudha—about the watch in a bid to portray the chief minister as no common man but as a person of extravagance. The chief minister tried to bail himself out by ‘revealing’ that the watch was gifted by his close friend, Dubai-based Gopal Pillai Girish Chandra Verma, during one of his visits to Dubai in 2015.
As per the union ministry’s code of conduct, ministers at the centre or state are not entitled to receive gifts from anyone. As the controversy continued to be a topic of debate during the proceedings at the state assembly on Wednesday, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, in an attempt to put the matter to rest, submitted his watch for preservation as state asset at the Vidhana Soudha.
BJP has maintained that the Hublot watch is worth a whopping Rs 70 lakhs. It even wrote a letter to Enforcement Directorate (ED) to initiate a probe into the assets of Siddaramaiah. Soon the furore over the watch turned out to be scene of washing dirty laundry. Congress in turn released details of the humongous assets of JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy and his son.
Even after Siddaramaiah submitted the watch to the state, the matter hadn’t settled. Kumaraswamy alleged that the watch “was stolen from Dr. Sudhakar Shetty’s house in May 2015” and he further demanded Girish Verma to file an affidavit regarding the watch.
