The Congress has made a resounding come back in Mysuru district by winning 8 out of 11 Assembly constituencies in the 2023 elections the results of which were announced on Saturday.
Its vote share in the segments where it lost is also high with the margin of defeat being narrow, all of which underscores Mysuru as the party’s traditional bastion.
This is in contrast to the 3 seats that the party won in the district in 2018 while the JD(S) had won 5 seats and BJP 3 seats.
The Congress performance was also buoyed with Mr. Siddaramaiah being fielded from Varuna at a time when the BJP was queering the electoral pitch and the Congress was yet to come to terms with the loss of its popular leader R. Dhruvanarayan who passed away in March.
The return of Mr. Siddaramaiah to Varuna had a rippling effect on the Congress not only in Mysuru but also in Chamarajanagar where it won 3 out of 4 seats and in the neighbouring district of Mandya where it won 5 out of 7 seats, taking the Congress tally in the Mysuru-Mandya-Chamarajanagar belt to 16 out of 22 seats.
To blunt the impact of Mr. Siddaramaiah the BJP ran a Varuna-centric campaign in a bid to confine him to the constituency and also fielded Lingayat leader V. Somanna as his opponent but the move proved futile.
The BJP which was hoping to be a frontrunner has barely made its presence felt its presence in the district and has won only the Krishnaraja segment while it failed to retain Chamaraja and Nanjangud constituencies which were wrested by the Congress.
The BJP had fielded T.S. Srivatsa, a grassroots workers, by denying ticket to four-time MLA S.A. Ramdas and the high drama surrounding the ticket denial had give Congress a fair chance to wrest the seat from the BJP. But M.K .Somashekar 66,467 votes against 73,760 votes of Mr. Srivatsa in a closely fought contest.
The Janata Dal (Secular) candidate G.T.Deve Gowda has retained the Chamundeshwari segment while his son Harish Gowda has emerged winner in Hunsur in a neck-to-neck contest with the incumbent MLA H.P. Manjunath of the Congress.
The Congress game-plan of fielding M.Sidde Gowda in Chamundeshwari, a former close-aide of Mr. G.T.Deve Gowda, did not yield results and the latter polled 1,04,873 votes against 79,373 votes of Mr. Sidde Gowda. The consolation for the BJP is that its candidate, V. Kaveesh Gowda, managed to poll 51,318 votes despite being a new-comer and pointing to the significant presence of BJP supporters in the constituency.
In Nanjangud Darshan Dhruvanarayan polled 1,09,125 votes and unseated the sitting MLA B. Harshavardhan of the BJP who secured 61,518 votes. The elections also saw the return of former Minister and Congress leader H.C. Mahadevappa who was elected from T. Narsipur by unseating M. Ashvin Kumar of the JD(S). Tanvir Sait of the Congress has been elected for the sixth time from Narasimharaja constituency. In Periyapatna K. Venkatesh secured 85,994 votes against his nearest rival K. Mahadeva of JD(S) who polled 66,269 votes.
In K.R. Nagar, D. Ravishankar of the Congress won against three-time MLA S.R. Mahesh of JD(S) and in Chamaraja K. Harish Gowda of the Congress trounced L. Nagendra of the BJP.
