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What do an MLA, a criminal, and a judge have in common? It sounds like the opening line of a bad joke, but that is what you have in the Chittapur constituency in Karnataka’s Kalaburagi. Here, the battle is between sitting Congress MLA Priyank Kharge, Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Manikanta Rathod, an exiled criminal with 40 cases, and a Junior First Class Magistrate court judge, Subhashchandra Rathod, who resigned in November 2022 and is contesting on a Janata Dal (Secular) ticket for a seat reserved for the Scheduled Caste community.
The sitting MLA Priyank Kharge has completed two terms and is looking to chalk up a win for the third time. Priyank’s lead over his closest rival, the BJP candidate Valmiki Naik lessened considerably in 2018 (4,393 votes), compared to the elections in 2013, where he defeated Naik with a margin of 31,191 votes. This time around, Priyank, who is the social media and communications head of the Karnataka Congress unit, was unable to spend as much time as he wanted to campaign in the constituency as he had to juggle multiple roles in the party. He was also the visible face of some of the serious rebuttals Congress party made in response to BJP campaigns. This forced him to have local Congress leaders meet with the constituents and campaign for him. “We have good leaders at the constituency, and they have been campaigning on my behalf,” he said.
BJP suffered two defections – Vishwanath Patil Hebbal and Arvind Chauhan – to Congress when it gave the ticket to Manikanta. Both were aspirants and unhappy about being preferred over a convicted criminal. Their campaigning for Congress is likely to make Priyank more confident in his prospects. He also has the added pressure of winning with a good margin in a district which was earlier represented by his father Mallikarjun Kharge as a Lok Sabha MP and considered to be the stronghold of the Kharge family. The senior Kharge – who is now a Rajya Sabha MP – is the president of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), and as such, the BJP is keen to wrest seats in Kalaburagi district to prove a point.
The constituency was introduced to Manikanta Rathod’s brand of politics in November last year when overnight, posters sporting Priyank’s picture and proclaiming ‘Missing’ appeared all over the Chittapur constituency. Manikanta said that Priyank had not appeared in his constituency for a couple of months and that he had ‘exiled himself’ at the same time he was exiled from the district as well. He later alleged that Priyank was planning to kill him.
Chittapur constituency is dominated by votes from the Lingayat community, followed by the Koli Kabbaliga community. There is also a considerable number of votes from the Banjara/Lambani community to which Manikanta belongs. Manikanta was exiled to Shivamogga district for a year by the police, who probably contemplated allocating personnel exclusively to register cases against him. A staggering number of cases – 40 – ranging from attempted murder and fraud have been registered against him. In 23 cases, he is accused of illegally transporting rice meant for the Public Distribution System. He also had convictions in three cases. One of them involved stealing milk powder meant for supply to children in Anganwadis and selling it on the black market, for which he received a year’s imprisonment and a Rs 10,000 fine.
But that has not stopped the party from standing by its decision of choosing him as a candidate. Tamil Nadu BJP state president Annamalai, who is also the poll in-charge of Karnataka, at a press conference, said that several factors were taken into account. The former IPS officer seemed unfazed by the criminal background and insisted that their internal survey pointed to Manikanta having the ‘winnability’ factor. Despite this ringing endorsement, an appearance by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for him was cancelled at the last minute, as the BJP organisers perhaps felt Manikanta might become a ‘kantaka’ (thorn) for them.
Manikanta has now sought special permission to enter the district and campaign in Chittapur. “I have been serving before, and I will continue to offer my services to people if I am elected,” he said. It cannot be held against the people of Chittapur if this promise elicits a fair bit of alarm in them. He also said that no one has dared to ask him how he can spend time serving his constituency when he has to spend a considerable amount of time attending to his legal problems.
On the ground Chittapur faces problems of unemployment, lack of basic infrastructure like roads, drinking water, access to healthcare, transport connectivity to villages, and pending compensation for those who gave land for cement factories, all of which the realpolitik practised by mainstream parties has failed to address.
These are some of the issues the JD(S) candidate Subhashchandra Rathod, who joined the party in February, is now familiar with. Subhashchandra said he has been repeatedly told by the people that he should have tried to meet the constituents at least six months earlier. “There are several issues like lack of buses to villages, availability of clean drinking water, poor road connectivity, which means that you travel one and a half hours for a distance that should take half an hour,” he said.
While the Chittapur poll was pegged as a contest between the Congress and BJP, Subhashchandra – who once as a judge had given permission to the police to lodge an FIR against Manikanta – hopes that Manikanta’s shenanigans and dissension among local BJP leaders means that he might get enough votes to place him as a significant challenger to Priyank.
Among the caste groups, the Koli Kabbaligas have long been seeking a change from their status as Other Backward Caste (OBC) to Scheduled Tribe, a promise the BJP made but did not deliver. Meanwhile, the Banjaras or the Lambanis have been up in arms about the split in percentages of reservations in the SC category, where the sub-category of Lambanis, Koracha, Korama and Bhovis have been grouped under Touchables category and allocated 4.5% reservation. The move has angered the four communities and leaders have been travelling across 18 districts, where their numbers are considerable, to convince voters not to vote for BJP.