B. Nagendra quits the Karnataka cabinet 25 days after he returned

Karnataka Planning and Statistics Minister B. Nagendra resigned on Friday, 25 days after he took the oath again. He told reporters at Vidhana Soudha that he had handed the letter to Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar. He denied any role in the Maharshi Valmiki Scheduled Tribes Development Corporation case and said he was being singled out as a Dalit leader.

"Is my signature anywhere in the Valmiki transaction?" he asked. He said he had not written a note or given a direction on the transfers. He accused the BJP of building a "false scam narrative" while the state is in drought, and said "Manuwadis" did not want a tribal minister to rise. Ministers Rizwan Arshad and Ajay Singh and Congress Rajya Sabha MP Nasser Hussain stood with him.

The BJP and JD(S) had opposed his return from the day of the 3 August expansion, when 19 ministers were sworn in under Shivakumar. They had disrupted the House and announced a padayatra from Raichur to Ballari over the corporation file. Friday's resignation came before that march could use his presence in the cabinet as its daily text.

The money trail that will not leave him

Investigators have said about ₹89.63 crore moved from a corporation account to a Union Bank of India account and then to other accounts. Earlier public figures in the same controversy have ranged from ₹89 crore to ₹187 crore depending on which slice of the file a party was quoting. Nagendra was Tribal Welfare Minister when the first wave broke. He resigned from Siddaramaiah's cabinet in June 2024.

The Enforcement Directorate arrested him in 2024. He spent about three months in custody and came out on bail. He says SIT and CID inquiries ran first, that a CBI case and the ED case followed, and that his name was added to a second chargesheet "in a hurry." He also said the governor had "handpicked" him for prosecution. Those are his claims. The chargesheets remain the documents a court will read.

This is the second time he has left the cabinet over the same corporation. The first exit was from the Siddaramaiah ministry. The second is from the Shivakumar ministry, after a gap of less than a month. He said he was ready to resign as an MLA and go to "the people's court." He has not, as of Friday night, vacated the Assembly seat.

What the resignation does for Shivakumar

Shivakumar took office this month after replacing Siddaramaiah. Re-inducting Nagendra was a signal to a Scheduled Tribe constituency and to a leader who had already paid a custody price. The cost was a running Opposition attack on the floor. Accepting the resignation stops that attack from owning the next sitting. It also leaves the ST welfare politics of the government without the minister who was supposed to embody it.

The legal case does not end with the letter. ED and CBI files move on their own calendar. If a court frames charges, the former minister will fight them as an MLA. If the second chargesheet is the document he says was rushed, his lawyers will try to cut his name out of it. None of that is resolved by a press conference.

The verified sequence is short. He left in 2024. He came back on 3 August 2026. He left again on 28 August. The corporation transfers that started the file are still the fact that both sides argue over. His question about a signature is the defence he wants on the record. The investigating agencies' paper is the other record.