Congress on Wednesday slammed the BJP for its failure to remove Karnataka chief minister B S Yedyurappa who hasbeen named by the lokayukta Santosh Hegde in a report on illegal mining in the state.

Congress sokesperson Manish Tiwari called the BJP leadership's silence on the issue "a pantomime of puppets" with strings being pulled by chief ministers of BJP-rules states.

Alleging that the top brass of the country's principal opposition party also received a cut of the money from illegal mining, Tiwari said Yeddyurappa had the party's national leaders in a bind as he was a top fund-raiser.

He also commented that the situation was alike with other BJP chief ministers dictating their terms with the party. "Raipur, Bhopal, Gandhinagar and Bengaluru dictate what the BJP leaders in Delhi should and should not do," he said.

"When these state units ask the national leaders to jump, they don't ask 'Why?'. They just ask 'How high?'" Tiwari remarked.

On the issue of former telecom minister and 2G accused A Raja naming prime minister Manmohan Singh and home minister P Chidambaram (then finance minister) during his trial in a CBI court, the Congress said it would not react to the statements immediately as the case was still on in court. However, Tiwari said the charges Raja made against Singh and Chidambaram were "baseless".