The Hindu
Udupi, May 18: Organisational strength and early campaigning helped the president of the State unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), D.V. Sadananda Gowda, in winning the election for the Udupi-Chikmagalur Lok Sabha seat. In addition, there was a wave in favour of the BJP in the coastal and central regions of the State.
Mr. Gowda began his campaign a couple of months before the election. As a result, he was able to complete three visits to each and every booth in the constituency. Udupi-Chikmagalur parliamentary seat was considered a safe one for the BJP as its candidates had won seven of the eight Assembly seats there during the 2008 State Assembly elections. They are: Udupi; Kundapur; Kaup; Sringeri; Tarikere; Mudigere; and Chikmagalur. The dissent among the leaders of the Congress turned out to be advantageous to the BJP, which was in a better position, when it came to resources, than the Congress.
Reduced margin
Despite all these favourable factors Mr. Gowda won by a mere 27,018 votes margin. A closer analysis of the results shows that the BJP has a lot to ponder over the parliamentary poll results. In the 2008 Assembly elections, the BJP candidates in the eight Assembly segments had secured 70,794 more votes than their Congress counterparts. But in the Lok Sabha elections, the party’s victory margin of 27,018 votes over its Congress rival works out less than 50 per cent of what it had managed to secure in the Assembly polls of 2008. Contrast this with the result of the Kundapur Assembly segment in 2008 Assembly elections - the BJP candidate, Halady Srinivas Shetty, alone had then defeated K. Jayaprakash Hegde of the Congress by 25,083 votes. This shows how slender the margin has been of the BJP’s candidate in the Udupi-Chikmagalur Lok Sabha constituency.
The Congress fielded K. Jayaprakash Hegde against Gowda as he was the least contentious of the other two contenders, former Ministers B.L. Shankar and D.K. Taradevi Siddartha. It was generally thought that Shankar could have given a tougher fight to Gowda here.
The delay in starting the campaign, resource crunch, weak organisational structure, and disunity among the party leaders hit the Congress hard. The division of “secular votes” owing to the presence of the Third Front’s Radha Sundaresh also added to the problems of the Congress in the constituency. Ms. Sundaresh polled 24,991 votes. According to political observers, Jayaprakash Hegde gave a heroic fight, in spite of the heavy odds stacked against him, to the BJP.