The Karnataka government’s ward reservation list for Bengaluru was issued on August 3. However, it did not sit well with Congress because if elections are held on the basis of this list, many seasoned Congress local leaders will not be able to contest from their wards.They claim that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) headquarters, located at "Keshava Krupa," is where the list was created. Some even staged a protest on August 5 by marching into the main office of the Urban Development Department and attempting to replace the existing name boards with those of the BJP and RSS.
According to senior Congress leader and Gandhinagar MLA, Dinesh Gundu Rao, reservation was a way to provide opportunities to communities and to enable social justice, but it had been subverted. “Seats have been reserved for Backward Classes in wards where there are lesser people from Backward communities. The BJP is also using reservation to ensure minorities don’t get to contest and conveniently 80% wards represented by Congress MLAs have been given to women,” he said.
The Congress is also unhappy with the way borders of the wards have been redrawn. The party feels that some wards where minorities have significant strength in numbers and had chances of winning, have been broken up and merged with other wards. This has led to fragmentation of the voting population supporting a minority candidate in a particular ward.
Based on the population and demographics of the Bengaluru city, a ward delimitation exercise was carried out by the state government that increased the number of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) council seats from 198 to 243. Following this, a ward reservation list was also issued. According to this list, 81 of the 243 seats have been set aside for candidates from the OBC community, 28 seats for the SC community, and four seats for the ST community. For the candidates from the general category, 130 seats in all have been set aside. Overall, seats have been further reserved for women in half of all the categories indicated above.
According to Congress leaders, a fair reservation is the one that reflects the area's demographics. Therefore, if a ward has to be reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC) or Scheduled Tribes (ST), then that ward must have a significant number from the SC/ST community residing there. The way the reservation has been carried out, Abdul Wajid, a former corporator from Congress said, does not reflect with the population. Similarly, when it comes to reservation for women, it must be spread throughout the city. However, a majority of the wards in Congress constituencies such as Gandhi Nagar and BTM Layout have been clustered and reserved for women.
“The delimitation itself was done very unscientifically. The census referred for this reservation is from 2011 and there have been many changes since then. What the BJP government has done is not legally right, some of our very strong candidates like Wajid and Gangambike and other former mayors have been completely cut off from these elections,” said former corporator M Shivaraj. He contests from the Shankar Math ward which used to be an OBC reservation, but is now reserved for SC and he will be unable to contest.
Abdul Wajid had also petitioned in the high court to guarantee that the BBMP elections are held on time, and is one among the many politicians who will suffer. His Manorayanapalya ward is now reserved for Backward Classes A (woman) which earlier came under the General category. "This is not just a Congress issue; many BJP members are also facing this issue. When it comes to women’s reservation, the only issue that we are facing here is that it has not been equally distributed, if it was equally distributed we’d have been fine. They do not want senior Congress leaders to be elected again. Everyone who had been opposing the BJP government has been affected. The BJP wants to win through twisted methods and that is not a fair election. We have filed our objections and await the final list. If our objections are not reflected in the list, we will be approaching the court," Wajid said.
“Politically on one hand, it looks like vendetta politics, on the other hand it subverts the spirit of reservation. The idea is not that women’s representation be skewed to certain parts of the city and this is depriving voters from reasonable gender representation in other parts of the city for no reason,” said Tara Krishnaswamy, founder of Political Shakti and Citizens for Bengaluru.
Furthermore, there are 45 general category wards out of which 39 are in the BJP constituency, “They have done this on purpose, so that they have the greatest flexibility. They should have also had an equivalent number of women’s wards or if those wards have other reserved categories, that is how they should have mapped it. That would be the honest people centric exercise. This is in complete violation of the spirit of delimitation and a manipulation of the electoral process for partisan politics,” Krishnaswamy further adds.
In response to the Supreme Court of India's order on July 28, the Karnataka government announced ward reservations for the BBMP to expedite the long-delayed elections. The state government recently redrew ward lines and increased the number of BBMP council seats from 198 to 243 as a result.
The High Court has also admitted petitions contesting the delimitation exercise and has issued notice to the state government.