Gujarat on their minds, Congress and BJP eye city voters

BENGALURU: The BJP and the Congress are striving to woo urban voters in election-bound Karnataka, after the recent Gujarat assembly polls showed that the saffron party managed to hold on to its clear edge in cities.

The need for the Congress to change this trend was stressed by even party president Rahul Gandhi during a New Year call to Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah. With Karnataka being one of the few states where Congress still has a stronghold, it has become crucial for the party to ensure it gets enough of the urban vote to form its government again.

“We are quite confident of getting the rural vote in most of the state, particularly due to chief minister Siddaramaiah’s image. But getting more of the urban vote is the challenge as the PM’s image is better than the CM’s among that electorate. We need to target that as that is where the BJP is the strongest,” a senior Congress leader admitted to ET.


Siddaramaiah, aware of the problem, recently started reaching out through social media platforms to the urban, educated electorate. He also cleared several multi-crore infrastructure projects for Bengaluru, while wooing the urban poor through the highly subsidised Indira Canteens that serves breakfast for Rs 5 and lunch for Rs 10.

“These efforts will not make a difference. The Indira Canteen appeals only to the migratory poor and will not bring about a vote swing. And Siddaramaiah’s outreach has come too late and will even be a patch in countering Modi’s appeal,” a top BJP leader said.

Regional party JD(S) does not have a substantial presence in the urban pockets, though it does have some stakes in Bengaluru, Mysuru, Mandya and Hassan. The battle for the urban vote is mainly between the two national parties.

The number of urban voters in Karnataka is over a third of the 4.9-crore electorate, with an estimated 100 of the 224 assembly constituencies dubbed ‘urban’. The Congress managed to do quite well in these constituencies in the 2013 elections, which brought it to power, but the BJP still did better.

The battle is most evident in IT capital Bengaluru, where the difference between the two parties was a slim 1.05% favouring the BJP in the elections to the city’s governing body Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) in 2015. In the state assembly polls in 2013, BJP got 13 seats against the 12 won by Congress. But in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP’s vote share was 7% more than the Congress’ and it won all three Parliament seats in the city.

“It shows that the Bengaluru voter votes differently depending on each poll,” a BJP backroom manager told ET. “This time, though, the anti-incumbency will help us against the Congress. In 2008, we had won 17 of the 28 seats in Bengaluru. This time, we think it may go up to 20.”

The Congress is aware of anti-incumbency in some of the Bengaluru and other urban constituencies and is working on changing its candidates. “Also, for the first time, we have set up booth-level committees and that will help us counter whatever advantage the BJP had earlier," a party strategist said.