Amid raining guarantees, BJP manages to limit Congress march in Karnataka

The ruling Congress has recorded a big jump in its tally in the 28-member Karnataka over just one seat in the 2019 polls while performing far below its own target of at least 15 seats. The party has won nine seats, despite going ballistic about the five guarantees the government implemented over the past one year.

While implementation of the schemes like free bus rides for women and cash transfer to women heads of families have not delivered results as expected, the BJP-JDS have swept the Old Mysuru region. Unlike the 2019 election when the Congress & JDS took on the BJP and bit dust, the BJP-JDS combine this time has worked well for both parties. The BJP has done well in the region suggesting successful transfer of JDS (read: Vokkaliga) votes to its candidates.
And sections of the BJP’s Lingayat voters seem to have voted for the JDS in Mandya and Kolar, boosting the regional party’s vote-share.


The BJP and JDS have won 17 and two seats, respectively. The results have given a rebirth to the JDS, whose morale had been down after the party’s pathetic performance in the assembly polls last year. While the BJP has indeed lost seven seats compared to its 2019 peak, independent analysts credit the party’s state president BY Vijayendra with limiting the damage from the Congress and retaining the pole position for the party.

POLITICAL SETBACK: In a way, the poll outcome is a setback for both Siddaramaiah and his deputy, DK Shivakumar. The CM camped several days in Mysuru and campaigned extensively to wrest both Chamarajanagar and Mysuru from the BJP. While the Congress did win Chamarajanagar, the BJP has retained Mysuru with local royal scion YKC Wadiyar’s big win.

The defeat of DK Suresh in Bengaluru Rural, the only Congress member to have won the 2019 polls, is being seen as a big blow to the ambitions of his brother, Shivakumar. The BJP’s gameplan of fielding ex-PM HD Deve Gowda’s son-in-law Dr CN Manjunath as its candidate against Suresh has paid off. A Gowda family clan won in a sign of the Vokkaliga votes drifting away from the Congress.

Among the BJP heavyweights, former CMs Basavaraj Bommai and Jagadish Shettar and Union Minister Pralhad Joshi have won from the Mumbai-Karnataka region (Kittur-Karnataka), while former CM HD Kumaraswamy got back Mandya, the seat where his son Nikhil Kumaraswamy had lost from in the previous LS election.

Of union ministers, Bhagwanth Khuba lost from Bidar, while Shobha Karandlaje won from Bengaluru North.

The Congress has bagged all five seats in the Hyderabad-Karnataka (Kalyana Karnataka) region AICC president Mallikarjuna Kharge comes from. In Kharge’s constituency of Kalaburagi, his son-in-law Radhakrishna Doddamani has won, wresting the seat from the BJP.

Of the seven constituencies in Mumbai-Karnataka (Kittur Karnataka), six have gone to the BJP, except Chikkodi seat in Belagavi district. In coastal Karnataka, the BJP has retained both seats of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi-Chikmagalur.