Ahead of the declaration of the schedule of the Karnataka Assembly polls by the Election Commission on March 29, the Congress leaders from the state’s dominant Lingayat community went into a huddle and came out to demand at least 55 poll tickets for the members of the community out of the total 224 seats.
The Congress has released its two lists of candidates so far for the May 10 polls — the first list of 124 candidates on March 25 and the second list of 42 candidates on April 6. Of these 166 tickets, 43 have been given to the members of the Lingayat community, with the Congress thus already equalling its total 43 tickets allotted to Lingayats in the 2018 Assembly polls.
With the ruling BJP no longer projecting its principal Lingayat leader B S Yediyurappa as the chief ministerial candidate, the Congress’s Lingayat group is of the view that it has a good chance of securing the backing of the state’s largest community in the polls, even though the party is not projecting a Lingayat as a CM face.
“The Lingayat community is with the Congress. Giving more tickets to candidates from the community will help the party’s prospects,” the state Congress’s working president and Lingayat leader Eshwar Khandre said after the Lingayat leaders had raised the demand for more tickets for the community members over a month ago.
The Congress’s first two lists of candidates have clearly signalled that the party is set to exceed its 2018 allocation of tickets to Lingayats this time.
The BJP, which is considered the “preferred party” of the Lingayat community since the 1990s, is yet to release even its first list of candidates. The saffron party had allotted 55 tickets to Lingayats in the previous polls.
Led by Yediyurappa, the BJP had emerged as the single largest party with 104 seats in the 2018 elections, when as many as 40 of its Lingayat nominees won the polls. On the other hand, 17 of 43 Lingayat candidates fielded by the Congress managed to bag their seats.
The Congress has allotted its second largest chunk of seats to the state’s other dominant community, Vokkaligas, with as many as 29 of its 166 tickets given to them so far. The Vokkaliga community is the second most populous community in the state. The Congress had fielded Vokkaliga candidates from 41 seats in 2018. State Congress president D K Shivakumar, who belongs to the Vokkaliga community, is one of the Congress frontrunners for the CM’s post in the event of the party’s victory in the polls.
With 36 seats reserved for the SC community, which accounts for the state’s 17 per cent population, and 15 seats reserved for the ST community, which makes up nearly 7 per cent of the population, all the parties would allot a proportionate number of tickets to its candidates from these two communities.
As regards other communities, the Congress has so far announced tickets for 11 Muslims, while over 40 tickets have been distributed among Other Backward Classes (OBCs) like Kurubas, Idigas, and others. The Kuruba leader and former CM Siddaramaiah is another frontrunner for the CM’s post in the Congress camp.
