Karnataka bypolls: Congress storms JDS bastion, wins two Lok Sabha seats

BANGALORE: Storming the JDS bastion, the ruling Congress in Karnataka today won the Mandya and Bangalore Rural Lok Sabha seats with impressive margins.

Multi-lingual actress Ramya, making her electoral debut, trounced JDS' C S Puttaraju in Mandya by a margin of 67,611 votes, officials said.

In Bangalore Rural, D K Suresh (Cong) registered an impressive victory bagging the seat with a margin of around 1,37,000 votes against his opponent JDS' Anitha Kumaraswamy, wife of former Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy. The seat was held by Kumaraswamy who resigned it after becoming an MLA in the May Assembly polls.

The Congress, which marked 100th day of its rule early this week, has wrested both the seats from JDS from its bastion in the Vokkaliga belt.

Both Ramya and Suresh maintained convincing leads right from the beginning as the counting of votes for the by-polls held on August 21 was taken up this morning and gradually increased the lead to unassailable levels.

Congress and JDS had fought bitterly in the run-up to the election, making it a no-holds-barred attack against each other.

BJP, which lost power in Assembly polls and does not count for much in the region, had backed JDS candidates in the two segments, which the Congress had dubbed "an unholy alliance."

The by-poll to Mandya was necessitated following the resignation of N Cheluvarayaswamy after he became MLA.

Suresh is the brother of senior Congress leader and MLA D K Shivakumar.

JDS had won five of the eight Assembly seats in Mandya district in the May elections.

In Bangalore Rural, where Kumaraswamy had won by 1.3 lakh votes in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, Congress had secured the support of Samajwadi Party MLA, C P Yogeeshwara, who had defeated Anita Kumaraswamy in the May polls.

In an immediate fallout, Kumaraswamy met Deve Gowda and conveyed his decision to step down as state unit chief and as opposition leader in the Assembly. "I underwent a cardiac surgery and maybe, the voters thought I need rest," he was quoted as saying emotionally by a party release.

Both Ramya and Suresh maintained convincing leads right from the beginning as the counting of votes for the by-polls was taken up this morning and gradually increased the lead to unassailable levels.

The by-poll to Mandya was necessitated following the resignation of N Cheluvarayaswamy after he became MLA.

In the May Assembly polls, JDS had won five of the eight seats in Mandya district.

In Bangalore Rural, Congress had secured the support of Samajwadi Party MLA, C P Yogeeshwara, who had defeated Anita Kumaraswamy in the May polls.