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At the gram panchayat office of Keragodu village — known for its multitude of temples dedicated to different deities — 14 km from the district headquarters of Mandya in south Karnataka, the Tricolour is hoisted on a newly-erected 108-ft-tall flagpole. Lower down, within a hand’s reach, are saffron Hanuman flags tied temporarily to the post.
Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar’s recent statement suggesting that he may contest the bypoll from the seat vacated by Janata Dal (Secular) leader and Union Minister H D Kumaraswamy has set off speculation about his next step.
The BJP’s choice of four Karnataka MPs for the Narendra Modi government’s Union Council of Ministers reflects the support it received in the state from the dominant castes in the Lok Sabha polls. But this has attracted criticism from the Congress for “ignoring backward communities”.
A rising Scheduled Tribe (ST) leader and senior legislator in Karnataka, who was inducted as a minister for the first time in May 2023 when the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government was formed, resigned Thursday after being embroiled in a case of alleged misappropriation of Rs 94.73 crore fund from the Karnataka Maharshi Valmiki Scheduled Tribes Development Corporation.
North Karnataka’s districts encompassing 14 Lok Sabha seats – where the BJP made a clean sweep in the 2019 polls riding the Narendra Modi wave – are going to polls Tuesday in the second and final phase of voting in the state (third phase in India), with local factors appearing to be more at play than national ones.
TWO RECENT incidents of caste violence over successive days, leaving voters in the Gulbarga Lok Sabha constituency polarised, could hit Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s efforts to wrest back the seat, from where he lost to the BJP in 2019. The stakes are even higher as the Congress candidate this time from the Scheduled Caste-reserved constituency, won by Kharge in 2009 and 2014, is Radhakrishna Doddamani, who is both Kharge’s brother-in-law (his wife’s brother) and son-in-law (his daughter’s husband).
AT A TIME when the ruling Congress has made the “delay” in release of drought relief funds by the Centre to Karnataka a poll issue, the agrarian crisis is set to be the determining factor in Raichur, one of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in north Karnataka going to polls on May 7. Another is the fear that in its next term, a BJP government at the Centre would “change the Constitution”.
Since April 26, when 14 seats in south Karnataka voted in the second phase of the Lok Sabha polls, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has been camping in the state’s north, where the remaining 14 seats will vote on May 7.
In the 14 Lok Sabha seats in Karnataka that go to polls on Friday, no single overwhelming factor came to the fore during the campaign. The Modi factor, a BJP-Janata Dal (Secular) alliance, the Congress’s welfare guarantees, a high cost of living, the murder of a young woman in distant Hubbali, and the fear of the changing of the Constitution are all undercurrents at play in the region.