The BJP on Monday pulled off a landslide victory in the Karnataka bye-polls, securing the Chief Ministership for BS Yediyurappa. In the process, the party has also managed to achieve yet another first of having more MLAs within Bengaluru city than the combined strength of the Congress and JD(S).
In the 2018 Assembly elections, the Congress had the highest number of MLAs from the state capital at 14. The BJP was limited to 12 seats and the JD(S) had won two seats.
But now, out of the 28 seats in the city, the Congress is reduced to 12 MLAs in the city, the JD(S) has been reduced to one lone MLA.
On Monday, the BJP won 12 out of the 15 Assembly seats which went to bye-polls on December 5. This means the BJP has now a strength of 117 MLAs in the 224-member Assembly. It also enjoys the support of independent MLA H Nagesh. The bye-polls were necessitated due to disqualification of 14 Congress and three JD(S) rebel legislators after they resigned from the Assembly in mid-July.
The BJP had fielded 11 former rebel Congress and three former rebel JD(S) legislators who joined the party on November 14 after the Supreme Court on November 13 allowed them to re-contest, though it upheld their disqualification by then Assembly Speaker KR Ramesh Kumar. The elections for RR Nagar seat, which was vacated by the disqualification of ex-Congress MLA Munirathna Naidu, is delayed due to ongoing litigation.
Incidentally, the BJP had won the BBMP Mayoral elections too recently for the first time in four years due to the influence of the rebel MLAs.
On Monday, all the turncoat MLAs in Bengaluru – Byrathi Basavaraj from KR Puram, K Gopalaiah from Mahalakshmi Layout, and ST Somashekar from Yeshwanthpur – managed to win with significant margins. The only non-BJP person to make the cut in Bengaluru was Rizwan Arshad. He managed to emerge victorious from Shivajinagar constituency. The BJP had fielded its former corporate Saravana from the Shivajinagar constituency.
Shivajinagar was earlier held by former minister and seasoned politician Roshan Baig, but his alleged involvement in the IMA Ponzi scheme resulted in him getting the cold shoulder from the BJP.
Baig who had defied the party whip like 16 other Congress-JD(S) MLAs was one of the two Congress MLAs to miss out on a BJP ticket. Denied a ticket, he chose to not contest the elections this time around