Union minister HD Kumaraswamy, who is also the State JDS president, met with the party’s core committee members on Friday evening to plan a strategy to get its candidate Govindaraju elected.
Both chief minister DK Shivakumar and Kumaraswamy have attached a lot of importance to the June 18 council polls as it has emerged as a proxy war between the two. The regional party sent the temperature soaring in Congress after it introduced a candidate at the eleventh hour. With that a contest became inevitable.
There are eight candidates in the fray for seven seats for which MLAs are the voters. The Congress earlier named five people and the BJP two, but the JDS decision to jump into the fray changed the scenario overnight.
Thippannappa Kamknoor, PV Mohan, BK Hariprasad, Shivanna and Vinay Karthik Prakash are contesting as Congress nominees, while the BJP has fielded Lingaraj Patil and Raghu R. With each MLA assigned a particular candidate, the contest is going to be between Govindaraju and Vinay Karthik Prakash, the fifth candidate by the Congress.
Sources close to Kumaraswamy said the party’s decision to field its candidate came after careful thought about the pros and cons. The BJP, they added, promised to assign six surplus votes to the JDS. The regional party itself has 18 MLAs, and it will require another four votes to win. “Our leader would not do something like this without a plan on his mind,” the source said.
The Congress camp is keeping a close watch on JDS activities. The CM, in a recent chat with the media, declined to comment, comparing his political moves to that of a master chess player.Shivakumar, who is a little over a week as the chief minister, is said to be worried about how some of his party’s disgruntled MLAs would react. The CM’s camp is concerned if some MLAs who were part of the previous Siddaramaiah cabinet and others use this as an opportunity to embarrass Shivakumar.
This fear of cross-voting may force one or both parties to sequester its MLAs to insulate them from the reach of the other party.
Shivakumar is an arch political rival of Kumaraswamy, and the JDS leader may well seek to tap the disgruntled Congress MLAs. If he succeeds, that will be a terrible loss of face for Shivakumar.
