In the recently concluded Assembly elections in Karnataka, the only region to buck the anti-incumbency trend against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in a big way was Bengaluru. The BJP improved its vote share by five percentage points in Bengaluru where, ironically, anti-incumbency against the BJP government seemed most visible. Prior to the elections, there were intense debates about the “crumbling civic infrastructure” and the hit that ‘Brand Bengaluru’ had taken, especially after the September 2022 floods. In fact, multiple pre-poll surveys had recorded high anti-incumbency against the government. But the results bore no evidence of this. On the other hand, the BJP improved its seat tally by one.
Fearing high anti-incumbency, the BJP denied ticket to its three-time MLA Aravind Limbavali from Mahadevapura, which houses the city’s IT corridor and was severely flooded in 2022. Instead, the party fielded his wife. Though BJP leaders had mostly given up hopes on that seat, the party won by a huge margin of 44,501 votes as against the 17,784 votes-lead by which it had won in 2018.
On the other hand, two Congress MLAs especially faced a tough challenge. While former Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee president Dinesh Gundu Rao won from Gandhi Nagar by a narrow margin of 105 votes, Sowmya Reddy lost the Jayanagar Assembly seat by the slimmest of margins — just 16 votes.
