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Bellary elections likely to be a tame affair this time

M D Riti in Bangalore

Last time, it had all the glamour of a five-star contest, fought in the glare of international attention. Now, the by-election scheduled for February 17 at Bellary, caused by Sonia Gandhi abandoning her hard-won seat here in favour of Amethi, looks a very tame affair.

Now, it is only the Congress who has much at stake here. Chief Minister S M Krishna, who is just over 100 days old in office, believes it is almost a prestige issue for him to win it. Until now, he has only scored stars on his performance report card, as far as the high command and Sonia Gandhi go. He does not want this to be his first black mark.

So the Congress is pulling out all stops at the state level, to try and ensure that their candidate, Kollur Basavana Gouda, wins. Pitched against him is K S Veerabhadrappa, the candidate put up jointly by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Janata Dal (United), after much bickering.

Deve Gowda's Janata Dal (Secular) is fielding former minister K Thippeswamy.

Surprisingly, former Union minister Arif Mohammed Khan, the one star candidate who was expected to lend colour to the fight and bring the spotlight back onto Bellary, left the small town quietly without even filing his nomination papers. Khan, who had announced that he would contest on behalf of the BSP, and that he was even learning Kannada, claims he quit the fight because of his still inadequate grasp of the local language. Now the BSP has put up Mudargi Nagaraj, more for form sake rather than any hope of winning.

As for Veerabhadrappa, he actually belongs to the BJP part of the alliance, and so hopes that Sushma Swaraj will come down to Bellary and campaign for him. But Swaraj has made it quite clear that she only participated the last time because Sonia Gandhi was in the fray, and that nothing more should be expected of her.

Veerabhadrappa was a Congressman until just before the last elections. He switched parties primarily because the Congress would not give him a ticket. So now he has a personal axe to grind: he would like to defeat his former party, just to teach them a lesson for passing over him.

K C Kondiah, the original candidate the Congress picked before Sonia decided that she wanted Bellary for herself, has since been consoled with a Rajya Sabha seat. So he is now out of the reckoning. The Congress chose Gouda almost by default. None of the three ministers elected from the district was willing to step down and jump into the fray, since they know their prospects are brighter if they stay in Karnataka rather than when they go to Delhi and occupy an Opposition bench.

Now the Congress has made all three ministers to camp at Bellary until after the elections. Meanwhile, general secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad also came into Bangalore briefly to make campaign plans. Both the major players have already got their electoral planks ready. The BJP-JD(U) combine is going to appeal to the people's pride, asking them to reject the Congress since Sonia rejected their constituency and favoured Bellary.

A worried Krishna has planned to dwell at length on the huge aid package that he has given Bellary, announced as soon as Sonia backed out and refused to even attend a victory celebration organised for her in Bellary. Secondly, Krishna is going to point out that his government has already been seen to be working and performing

Gouda himself is quite well-known in Bellary. He belongs to the Lingayat community, which forms the largest group in Bellary. He is quite an activist in the community, running some educational institutions there and being involved in district-level politics for the Congress. His rival, Veerabhadrappa, is also a Lingayat, and has even won this seat for the Congress in 1977.

However, the squabbles between his party and the JD(U) cost him something by way of image: The JD(U) insisted that it had taken Bellary, as per the original seat adjustment it had with the BJP, and only conceded it when Sonia announced her candidature.

The candidate currently considered the least likely to win is one Purushottam, put up by the Republican Party of India.

Both the Congress and the BJP hope they can bring some much-needed glamour to this otherwise lacklustre election by drawing some film stars to campaign. Either way, the Congress looks all set to retain what has always been one of its strongholds in Karnataka.

Assembly Election 2000

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