Faced with coastal Karnataka ‘saffron wall’, Congress counts on welfare schemes, local factors

Back in the 1990s, Kota Srinivas Poojary was a regular speaker at campaign events for K Jayaprakash Hegde, canvassing for the then Janata Dal leader in the erstwhile Assembly seat of Brahmavar in Karnataka’s Udupi district. Three decades on, much has changed for the two. Poojary is now the BJP candidate from the Udupi-Chikmagalur Lok Sabha constituency, taking on Hegde for whom he once sought votes.

Udupi-Chikmagalur falls partly in coastal Karnataka, often dubbed the “laboratory of Hindutva”, and partly in Malnad. As in other constituencies in the coastal Karnataka region, such as Dakshina Kannada, the Hindu right wing has been a dominant force in Udupi-Chikmagalur that was at the centre of the hijab row a couple of years ago. The Congress, facing an uphill battle, is now banking on the Siddaramaiah government’s guarantee schemes and local caste and community factors to go toe-to-toe with the BJP in Udupi-Chikmagalur and Dakshina Kannada, where polling is scheduled to be held in the second phase on April 26.

Though the “saffron wall” in this part of Karnataka took some hit last year as the Congress swept back to power in the state elections — at present, four Assembly segments in the Chikmagalur area of Udupi-Chikmagalur are with the Congress and in Dakshina Kannada, the party managed to win Puttur after almost a decade — it remains a challenge to break it down in the Lok Sabha elections.

The Congress held Udupi-Chikmagalur briefly after Hegde won it in a 2012 bypoll necessitated by D V Sadananda Gowda’s resignation as MP following his appointment as Karnataka chief minister. But Hegde lost the seat two years later in the 2014 elections and the party failed again in 2019. It is an even bigger story of BJP dominance in