The offering of the Udupi-Chikkamagaluru parliamentary seat to the Janata Dal (Secular) as part of the seat sharing agreement between the Congress and the Janata Dal(S) has not gone down well with some Congress leaders here.
Amrit Shenoy, AlCC member, told The Hindu on Thursday that there was no rationale in giving the Udupi-Chikkamagaluru parliamentary seat to the Janata Dal(S), especially as it has no base worth its name in the four Assembly segments of Udupi district. The Congress had a minimum vote-base of 50,000 in these segments in the 2018 Assembly elections.
At the grassroots level, the Congress has gram panchayat members in the four Assembly segments of Udupi, Kaup, Karkala and Kundapur. It has a vote-base of about 20,000 votes in Chikkamagaluru and Tarikere Assembly segments in Chikkamagaluru district.
In the 2014 parliamentary polls, the former Minister late V. Dhananjay Kumar had contested as Janata Dal(S) candidate from Udupi-Chikkamagaluru parliamentary seat and had managed to secure 14,895 votes, he said.
Many Congress workers were unhappy over the seat being given to the Janata Dal(S) here. “This is unacceptable to me. But I will raise this issue aggressively on the party platform and oppose it. If the party high command fails to convince me, I may consider quitting the party and contest as an Independent to register my protest,” Mr. Shenoy said.
Meanwhile, some BJP leaders had a field day enjoying the predicament of the Congress in Udupi district. The Congress and the BJP are the major parties in the district.
K. Raghupati Bhat, BJP MLA representing Udupi Assembly constituency, tweeted: “Look at the condition the Congress has been reduced to now. It was no less a person than the former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who contested from Chikkamagaluru parliamentary seat (which has become Udupi-Chikkamagaluru parliamentary seat after the delimitation exercise) in the bypolls in 1978. Now, the party has no candidate to show.”
“If a party (Congress) that ruled the country does not have a candidate at all for the constituency, it shows the capacity of the party,” Mr. Bhat said, in his tweet.
