The Bharatiya Janata Party, riding on Modi wave, registered a convincing victory in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi-Chikmagalur Lok Sabha constituencies, reversing the trend witnessed during the 2013 Assembly elections.
While the party lost the 2012 byelection in the Udupi-Chikmagalur constituency, with Congress candidate K. Jayaprakash Hegde winning the seat, it bounced back on Friday by a huge margin. BJP candidate Shobha Karandlaje defeated Mr. Hegde by a margin of over 1.81 lakh votes.
In Dakshina Kannada, the party won for the seventh consecutive time. BJP candidate Nalin Kumar Kateel defeated Congress veteran B. Janardhana Poojary by a margin of 1.43 lakh votes.
The two victories have come a year after the BJP faced a significant loss in the 2013 Assembly elections. It had won only one of the eight Assembly constituencies in Dakshina Kannada and three of the eight segments in the Udupi-Chikmagalur Parliamentary constituency.
Congress leaders, who had been denying that there was a Modi wave hitherto, conceded its presence on Friday.
Rajaram Tolpady, professor, Department of Political Science, Mangalore University, said though the results in the State and the coastal districts were in tune with the scene elsewhere in the country, he did not expect such a huge victory for the BJP in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi-Chikmagalur.
To counter the Modi wave, the Congress attempted to highlight the development agenda of the party in Karnataka and the achievements of the UPA government at the Centre. They focussed on schemes such as Anna Bhagya and Ksheera Bhagya. But, this did not have the desired impact. In Dakshina Kannada, Mr. Poojary’s averments that the fight was between him and Mr. Modi and his efforts to present his rival as a weak Parliamentarian too did not favour him.
