Karnataka Elections 2018 Why top leaders are contesting from two seats?

Karnataka Elections 2018

Why top leaders are contesting from two seats?   

By Deepak Parvatiyar  

The Marathi translation of this article was published in leading Marathi daily Pudhari on 2nd May 2018

http://newspaper.pudhari.co.in/fullview.php?edn=Goa&artid=PUDHARI_GOA_20180503_04_1

To contest from two assembly seats simultaneously has become a fashion for the political heavyweights of Karnataka. With the exception of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Chief Ministerial candidate and state BJP chief BS Yeddyurappa, who has reposed faith in his old bastion Shikaripura, the other political bigwigs, cutting across party line, have opted to contest from more than one seat.

While the incumbent chief minister Siddaramaiah is the Congress candidate from Chamundeshwari as well as Badami, former CM Haradanahalli Devegowda Kumaraswamy is the Janata Dal (Secular) candidate from Channapatna and Ramanagara. BJP’s young turk B Sriramulu is contesting from Molakalmuru in Chitradurga district, as well as from Badami, where he takes on Siddaramaiah.

Contesting elections from more than one seat is nothing new though. There are examples of some top politicians contesting more than one seats simultaneously. Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had contested the 1980 Lok Sabha elections from Medak and Rae Bareli after she had lost elections in 1997.

Yet it was Former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who set precedence by contesting from more than two constituencies. After he had lost his deposit in his very first parliament election , which was a by election that he had contested from Lucknow in 1955,he had contested the 1957 elections from three constituencies — Lucknow, Mathura and Balrampur. While he was defeated in Lucknow, and lost his deposit in Mathura, he had won from Balrampur. But in the 1962 elections, he had lost from all three seats. In the 1967 general election, he had won from Balrampur while losing from Lucknow and Mathura.This was because perhaps he was unsure of his victories from Lucknow. Another fact was that he was one of the most important opposition leaders of the time, who was needed in Parliament. Vajpayee had contested from two seats – Lucknow and Vidisha (Madhya Pradesh) in 1991 and then Gandhinagar (Gujarat) and Lucknow in 1996. Though on both occasions he had won both seats but had retained Lucknow.

Similarly present prime minister Narendra Modi too had contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections from Vadodara in his home state of Gujarat, and Varanasi – where he had faced a serious challenge from the Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal who had carried the image of a giantkiller with him after his victory over a formidable Sheila Dikshit in the Delhi assembly elections in 2013.

Before that, even Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, who had become the Congress president despite protests from senior party leaders Sharad Pawar, P.A.Sangma and Tariq Anwar, who had finally quit the Congress in protest in 1998, had opted for two seats, Bellary in Karnataka and Amethi, her family's home turf, to contest her maiden Lok Sabha elections in 1999. She had then won both the seats but had retained Amethi.

There are parallels in states also. More recently, in 2016, former Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi, after falling out with Nitish Kumar and forming his own party, the Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM), had contested from Imamganj as well as Makhdumpur assembly constituencies as HAM candidate in the 2016 Bihar assembly elections. He was defeated in Makhdumpur then. Just before him in Jammu and Kashmir in 2014,  the then sitting J&K  chief minister Omar Abdullah too had contested the state elections from two seats -- Sonawar in Srinagar and Beerwah in Budgam. At that time he had lost from Sonawar and had just scraped through by 1000 votes margin in Beerwah.

This time the top Karnataka leaders have taken this trend to their home state rather more emphatically with almost all top rung leaders barring Yeddyurappa contesting from more than one seats. Does this show these leaders’ indispensability to their respective party or does this reflect also factor in the vulnerability aspect?

Consider the case of the present chief minister Siddaramaiah. Last time he had won from Varuna -- a constituency carved out of Chamundeshwari due to delimitation. Siddaramaiah had won 7 out of the 7 elections he had contested from there. This time though, he has left this seat for his younger son Dr.Yathindra. So that to an extent explains Siddaramaiah’s reasons to opt for two seats. The first seat is Chamundeshwari. It is from here that Siddaramaiah had first won by just 250 votes in a byelection in December 2006. The going is not that easy this time too as he is pitted against friend-turned-rival GT Devegowda, who is the sitting JD-S MLA from Chamundeshwari. This explains his opting for the Badami seat too. At Badami too, again there is a keen contest between Siddaramaiah and Sreeramulu – a BJP MP and party’s state unit vice president. Badami is a new seat for both and reports suggest that Siddaramaiah had to negotiate hard to ensure that 11 of the 35 candidates who had filed nominations dropped out in his favour.

Similarly in case of Sriramulu, with Siddaramaiah as his formidable opponent in Chamundeshwari, he has another seat, Molakalmuru to fall back on, which is considered his stronghold. To accommodate him here, the BJP had dropped the sitting MLA S Thippeswamy.

In case of Kumaraswamy, he is a contender from Ramanagara and Channapatna. At Channapatna he is pitted against BJP’ s CP Yogeshwara, who had won the seat on a Samajwadi Party ticket and in the process, defeated Kumaraswamy’s wife Anitha in 2013.. Reports suggest that winning Channaptna would not be an easy task for Kumaraswamy, as his opponent Yoganna, as BJP candidate and incumbent MLA C P Yogeshwara, an actor-turned-politician, is better known. Yogeshwara is quite popular among women and farmers, because of his efforts to set up a couple of textile factories that ensured  jobs for locals. He has also taken significant steps towards filling up of several dried-up tanks that revived agriculture in this arid belt. Besides, state Transport minister HM Revanna, who is Congress candidate in Channapatna, is no pushover either.

This explains Kumaraswamy’s move to also contest from neigbouring Ramanagara, which is being considered a much safer seat for him from where he has been winning since 2004. He is a sitting MLA from here.

The above analysis suggest that given the keen contest between the political parties in Karnataka, the political heavyweights are on one hand not willing to yield any space to their political opponents and are contesting themselves at swing seats. On the other hand, they are also ensuring that they have a safer seat to fall back on. Indeed this further signifies the neck and neck contest that Karnataka election has become this time.