Bengaluru: Thirteen of 15 newly-elected members of the Karnataka Assembly took oath as the members of the house here this morning. Karnataka Assembly Speaker Vishveshwar Hegde Kageri administered them the oath.

Two Congress members —  H.P. Manjunath and Rizwan Arshad — who also got elected to the Assembly recently in the by-elections, remained absent while 12 BJP MLAs and one independent took oath. 

The members who were administered oath as MLAs are S.T. Somasekhar, Bhyrathi Basavaraj, K. Gopalaiah, Ramesh Jarkiholi, Mahesh Kumthalli, Shrimant Patil, Anand Singh, Dr. K. Sudhakar, Narayana Gowda, Shivaram Hebbar, B.C. Patil, Arun Kumar (all from BJP) and Sharath Bachchegowda (Ind).

Among the fifteen sitting members, who were disqualified by the Speaker, earlier, as many as 11 were re-elected to the Karnataka Assembly while former ministers MTB Nagaraj and H. Vishwanath tasted defeat in the by-polls held on Dec. 5. 

With the inclusion of 12 members in their fold, the strength of the ruling BJP in the House has risen to 117 and thus they have attained majority in 224-member Karnataka Assembly.