The Congress has stormed the Janata Dal (Secular) bastion in Mandya by winning 5 of the 7 seats in the district while the BJP’s efforts to make inroads into the Vokkaliga heartland has come a cropper.
Congress candidates Ravikumar Gowda was elected from Mandya, P.M. Narendraswamy was elected from Malavalli, A.B. Bandisiddegowda from Srirangapatna; N. Chaluvarayaswamy from Nagamangala and K.M. Uday from Maddur. Darshan Puttanaiah who contested as Sarvodaya Karnataka Paksha candidate, won the polls by defeating his nearest rival C.S. Puttaraju of JD(S). The only face saver for the JD(S) is the victory of its candidate H.T. Manju in K.R. Pet where he has trounced former Minister Narayanaswamy of the BJP.
The five Assembly segments in the Congress kitty should be seen in the backdrop of the 2018 elections when the party drew a blank and the JD(S) had walked away with all the seven seats.
The Congress can also claim a moral victory in Melkote constituency where it did not field any candidate against Darshan Puttanaiah, son of late K.S.Puttanaiah who was the president of Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha. This was as a mark of respect to the KRRS leader and to signal to the farmers that the Congress was with them.
The BJP which won the K.R. Pet byelections in 2019 to open its account in Mandya not only failed to retain the seat but was routed in the district where it has drawn a blank.
Its rout should be seen in the context of intensive efforts the party made to secure a foothold in the sugarcane belt. The BJP’ had blown the election bugle for Karnataka elections from Mandya in December 2022 when Union Home Minister Amit Shah inaugurated a mega diary at Gejjalgere and in a public meeting signalled the party’s intention to go it alone. Mr. Shah had torn into both the Congress and the JD(S) and dubbed them as both dynastic and corrupt and had held out the prospects of growth and development for Mandya under the “double engine’’ government with BJP at both the Centre and the State.
The party had also invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Mandya to inaugurate the Bengaluru-Mysuru Expressway, underlining the party’s seriousness of breaching the Vokkaliga fortress and to make inroads in the district. The BJP’s intensive focus in and around Mandya was also based on its premises that the party’s hold and popularity in the coastal belt, Central and North Karnataka region was a given and only Old Mysuru region of which Mandya belt is a part, mattered. But the calculations have gone awry.
Mandya MP Sumalatha Ambareesh, who was elected as an independent in the 2019 Parliamentary elections, also extended her support to the BJP but to no avail.
