Old Mysuru pumps oxygen into JDS, giving the regional party hopes it badly needed

JDS state president HD Kumaraswamy and Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president DK Shivakumar had been locked in an intense battle over the past 18 months to prove their popularity in the Vokkaliga heartland of Old Mysuru region. This only intensified after the Congress won in the assembly polls last year, leaving the regional party deeply wounded.

The April 26 vote has infused oxygen into the JDS, , while redeeming the 64-year-old former CM's sway over the community votes across the 11 districts in the Old Mysuru region. Of them, the ruling Congress has been able to win only two seats, Hassan and Chamarajanagar. The rest have gone to the BJP-JDS combine.

The JDS and ex-PM HD Deve Gowda’s family, in fact, have together got three seats including the Bengaluru Rural won by cardiologist Dr CN Manjunath who contested on a BJP ticket. He defeated Shivakumar’s younger brother DK Suresh in a seat some people believed the DK brothers had an iron grip on. Three-time MP Suresh’s fame soared after he emerged the only Congress winner in the 2019 general election.

Both Kumaraswamy and Shivakumar camps had worked hard in the 11 seats to impress voters as the stakes were high for both. Having won handsomely in the assembly polls, it became critical for Shivakumar to prove his clout once again to bolster his image in the party as he nursed chief ministerial ambitions.

The blow the JDS received from the setback in the assembly polls was so severe that the JDS re-established its broken relationship with the BJP in September last year over concerns of losing out its MLAs to the Congress. Since its founding in the late 1990s, the JD(S) has built its identity around Vokkaligas. But it suffered its harshest defeat in two decades when its tally in the assembly crashed to 19 seats, in last year’s polls. In 2018, the party had fared much better with 37 seats.

When the two parties ran the coalition regime in 2018-19, Kumaraswamy and Shivakumar projected a public image of being great friends. In the years that followed, they kept a wide political distance as both targeted the same segment of voters. The community, the second largest in Karnataka after Lingayats, sees Deve Gowda as their tallest political figure, and Shivakumar, who has won the assembly polls non-stop since 1989, has been pursuing ambitions to lead it.