Though Karnataka will send only one woman member to the 16th Lok Sabha — which will have 61 women, the highest ever — the victory margin of 1.81 lakh for Shobha Karandlaje (Bharatiya Janata Party) from Udupi-Chikmagalur is the highest in recent times for a woman contestant.
The two Congress women contestants — Ramya from the Mandya Lok Sabha constituency and Lakshmi Hebbalkar from Belgaum — got over 40 per cent of the polled votes and were in the second spot in their respective constituencies.
This election saw the defeat of Ms. Ramya, who had won the bypoll from the same constituency less than a year ago. The victory margin of her opponent this time, C.S. Puttaraju of the Janata Dal (Secular), was a slim 5,518 votes.
While Geetha Shivarajkumar of the JD(S) polled 21.31 per cent of the votes in her constituency of Shimoga, the other five of the nine women contestants from mainstream parties lost their deposit, having got less than 6 per cent of the polled votes.
One in 2009 tooIn the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the lone woman MP from Karnataka, J. Shantha of the BJP, had got 4,02,213 votes in Bellary, which translated to a vote share of 46.72 per cent of the polled votes. The margin of her victory, however, was a wafer thin 2,243 votes.
In the 2004 elections, Tejaswini Gowda had won from the then Kanakapura constituency against JD(S) supremo H.D. Deve Gowda, while Manorama Madhwaraj won from Udupi on BJP ticket.
