For Nandan Nilekani, the first cut is the deepest

By KR Balasubramanyam


On May 16, as election officials counted the votes polled for Bangalore South, the BJP candidate Ananth Kumar sat himself in a corner, hiding his emotions. Every few minutes, his partymen supplied him with information about the latest trends.

Poker-faced, Kumar refused to offer comments on the trends. Nandan Nilekani, his Congress rival and Infosys co-founder, visited the counting centre in the morning, and returned some time later to concede his defeat and convey his wishes to Kumar. When all the votes were counted, the BJP leader and sitting MP had won with a margin of about 2.19 lakh votes.

Janardhana, a resident of Basavanagudi, does not recollect any election in Bangalore South in the past two decades that kicked up as much voter interest and participation as the one involving Kumar and Nilekani. “This one was the most colourful for both the no-holds-barred campaigns as well as the use of technology to connect with voters. The presence of AAP candidate made the event even more interesting,” Janardhana says.

That indeed was the case. The battle between Kumar and Nilekani was among the most watched one in India — it looked as though Kumar had finally got a tough challenger in Nilekani.

Boosting Kumar’s campaign efforts was Tejaswini Ananth Kumar, the BJP candidate’s wife, who runs a non-profit called Adamya Chetana that supplies 1.8 lakh midday meals to school children everyday. “He could get so many votes because of a combination of factors: the goodwill that he enjoys among his voters, the very hard work put in by our party cadre, and the Narendra Modi wave,” she says. Bangalore’s MLA from Rajajinagar, S Suresh Kumar, says Bangalore South has stood by the BJP since 1991. “The latest results uphold the fact that Bangalore South is an anti-Congress constituency. People here see Kumar as a big enough national leader,” he says. With his sixth win, Kumar has turned out to be the only MP from Karnataka to have such a distinction.

Nilekani, a promising Congress leader, has reconciled to his defeat in a constituency where he was born, and still lives. “This was a hard-fought campaign,’ he says. The man, who as CEO and MD at Infosys took the IT bellwether to its first billion dollars in revenue, is not going to turn his back on politics, or stop engaging with the affairs of Bangalore. “As I said during the campaign, I will continue to work for you in the coming months and years. I may not have the opportunity to serve you as an MP, but my work for Bangalore continues.”