Impressive increase in the vote share of the Congress in the 2013 Assembly elections, compared with its performance in 2008, helped the party win 23 of the 40 seats in the Hyderabad Karnataka region.
The Congress, which won only 14 seats in the 2008 from the region, polled 17,76,321 votes in the just-concluded elections compared with 14,30,711 votes in 2008, up by 3,37,610.
The Bharatiya Janata Party turned out to be the major loser polling 10,45,438 votes winning five seats as against 14,79,410 in 2008 when it won 21 seats. Many party stalwarts, including the outgoing Animal Husbandry Minister Animal Husbandry Minister Revu Naik Belamgi (four-time MLA) were dumped on the wayside by the voters.
JD(S) gains
Another surprising gainer is the Janata Dal (Secular), whose tally went up by 1,08,878 votes in 2013 from 2008. The party polled 7,01,964 votes then and garnered 8,10,842 now. The party made gains in traditional bastions of the Congress and the BJP in Raichur, Koppal and Bellary districts. The JD(S) won five seats in 2013 elections, as against four in 2008.
The emergence of the KJP and the BSR Congress inflicted a mortal blow on the BJP in the entire Hyderabad Karnataka region. The performance of the BSR Congress, particularly in Bellary, Raichur and Koppal districts, had been impressive. The BSR Congress won two seats in Bellary district — B. Sriramulu from Bellary Rural and Suresh Babu from Kampli — by impressive margins. In Bellary the vote share of BSR Congress was 19.35 per cent and in Raichur 10.25 per cent and Koppal 7.30 per cent.
Although the KJP could win only three of the 40 seats, the party made its presence felt strongly by polling with an impressing 7,27,632 votes in the region.
Karnataka Makkala Paksha made a opening in the State politics by winning its lone seat Bidar South with its founder-president and industrialist Ashok Kheny winning by a margin of 15,788 votes. Another winner was B. Nagendra who had won the 2008 Assembly elections on a BJP ticket, and won in 2013 as an Independent and won the Kudlagi seat in Bellary district by a margin of more than 24,800 votes.
