Team News Riveting
Bengaluru, May 14
The newly elected legislators of Congress party authorised the National President Mallikarjun Kharge to decide who will be the new Chief Minister of Karnataka.
The Congress party trumped the BJP to return to the power in Karnataka winning 135 seats in the 224-member house. The BJP won only 66 seats, down from 104 in the 2018 state election.
It did not win a single seat reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST) category. Karnataka has 51 reserved constituencies, out of which 36 are for Scheduled Castes (SC) candidates and 15 for ST candidates.
The scale of the Congress win is a record in terms of both seats and vote share in over 30 years. The party won 135 seats – 55 more than in 2018 – with a vote share of 42.88 per cent. The closest the Congress came to this score was in 1999 when it won 132 seats and had a vote share of 40.84 per cent. In 1989, it won 178 seats with a vote share of 43.76 per cent.
Amidst the flurry of political activities in Bengaluru to decide among D K Shivakumar and Siddaramaiah to head the next government, Congress General Secretaries Sushil Kumar Shinde, Deepak Babaria and Jitendra Singh Alwar landed as observers at the Karnataka Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting. The CLP unanimously passed a resolution authorising Kharge to take the final decision.
According to Congress sources, the new Karnataka Chief Minister and the cabinet will take oath on Thursday. Congress leaders DK Shivakumar and Siddaramaiah have expressed interest in the top post, raising concerns over a stand-off if the matter is not resolved. While Siddaramaiah’s supporters put up a poster outside his home in Bengaluru as “the next Chief Minister of Karnataka, posters have come up outside Shivakumar’s house, wishing “birthday greetings” to “the new Chief Minister of Karnataka”. His birthday is tomorrow.
The supporters of both the Congress leaders raised slogans outside the Bengaluru hotel where the CLP meeting took place.
The Gandhis and Kharge will attend the oath-taking event on Thursday, party sources said, adding that the Congress has sent invitations to all “like-minded” parties to attend it.
