Karnataka Assembly Elections 2018: Congress releases 1st list of candidates

Congress announced a list of 218 candidates for the 224-member Karnataka assembly late on Sunday. Candidates for five constituencies -- Kittur, Sindgi, Nagthan, Raichur and the controversial Shantinagar seat, whose MLA N A Haris’ son is in jail for rowdy behaviour -- are yet to be announced.

In the sixth seat of Melukote, the Congress is likely tol support Darshan Puttanaiah, the Swaraj India candidate who is the son of the late MLA and farmer leader Puttanaiah.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had his way despite naysayers and has been given the ticket for the Chamundeshwari assembly segment where the Janata Dal(S) and the BJP have vowed to defeat him. The High Command and several of Siddaramaiah’s supporters reportedly asked him to switch to the “safer” Badami seat from Bagalkote district that is dominated by his community members, the Kurubas.


Siddaramaiah is said to have proposed that he will contest both but was reportedly asked to choose one, after party seniors Mallikarjun M Kharge and Veerappa Moily objected to him standing from two constituencies. So he dropped the plan to contest from Badami, which has been given to a newbie and instead decided to stick to his old constituency of Chamundeswari, which elected him five times between 1983 and 2006. He lost twice there in 1989 and 1999.




Siddaramaiah’s son Yatheendra, a political novice has been given the ticket from Varuna, which his father represented in 2008 and 2013. Other sons and daughters include: home minister Ramalinga Reddy’s daughter Sowmya (Jayanagar), law minister T B Jayachandra’s son Santosh (Chiknayakanahalli), Kolar MP K H Muniyappa’s daughter Roopa Shashidhar (KGF).

However, public works minister H C Mahadevappa's son Sunil Bose, who was asking for the Nanjangud seat, has not been accommodated.

The list prompted Union minister D V Sadananda Gowda to tweet: "Siddaramaiah's son gets ticket. Ramalinga Reddy’s daughter gets ticket. Jayachandra’s son gets ticket. Why doesn't Mahadevappa's son get ticket. INC always Snubbed Dalits."? (Mahadevappa is a Dalit leader).

Congress state unit campaign committee chairman and power minister D K Shivakumar’s relative H D Ranganath gets the Kunigal ticket. The wives of sitting MLAs Qamarul Islam and Rudre Gowda, who died, Fatima and Kirtana respectively, get the tickets for their husbands’ seats of Gulbarga Uttar and Belur.

Fifteen women and the same number of Muslims get the party ticket, many of them in new constituencies which have not had women or Muslim representation earlier. Two Christians and two Jains have made it to the list. Three sitting MLCs, H M Revanna, M R Seetharam and Srinivas Mane have been given tickets to contest for the assembly.

The Congress has given tickets to 102 sitting MLAs and 11 party hoppers. The party changed its sitting MLAs in ten seats, three of them -- Badami, Hangal and Gulbarga rural -- due to ill-health. All the MLAs who moved from the Janata Dal (S) to the Congress have been given the party ticket despite stiff opposition from some quarters.

The controversial Ashok Kheny, who is accused of malpractices in an infrastructure project by a legislature house committee, has also got the Bidar South ticket, reportedly at Siddaramaiah’s insistence. A former IAS officer Siddaiah, considered closed to Siddaramaiah, gets the ticket for Sakleshpur constituency. But some candidates that the CM was backing, like

MLC V S Ugrappa from Molkalmuru, his former secretary ?Bhimrao ?Shinde from Aurad and another secretary Hira Naik from Mayakonda, were not given the ticket.