Bengaluru: Karnataka Congress Thursday officially announced C.P. Yogeeshwara as its candidate for the upcoming Channapatna bypolls, hours after the 57-year-old decided to jump ship from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Yogeeshwara’s defection sent the BJP and its alliance partner Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S), into a frenzy, necessitating high-level discussions with the party’s top brass in Delhi, ThePrint has learnt.

“We are holding a meeting with our alliance partners and our own leaders to decide on the next course of action and announce our candidate at the earliest,” a JD(S) leader, requesting anonymity, had told ThePrint Thursday. Hours later, the JD(S) and BJP named Nikhil, the actor-politician son of Union minister H.D. Kumaraswamy as the alliance candidate for the Channapatna seat.

Three seats in Karnataka—Shiggaon, Sandue and Channapatna—will go to bypolls on 13 November with all eyes set on the third constituency as political parties continue leaving no stone unturned to win the seat.

For the JD(S), Channapatna is an important seat and a chance for former Prime Ministers H.D. Deve Gowda and Kumaraswamy, his son, to demonstrate their sway on the agrarian, land-owning Vokkaliga community.

It will also be an opportunity for the Gowdas to thwart any attempt by state Congress president and Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar and Yogeeshwara to lay claim to being Vokkaliga leaders.

Though it is an important seat, questions are still being raised over why the top brass of the BJP would be so invested in one assembly bypoll seat in rural Karnataka, particularly in light of the impending Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand.

The Congress swept the 2023 assembly elections in the state, winning 135 out of the 224 seats, so winning—or losing—just one more seat is unlikely to have any major impact.

The fight in Channapatna is about something more than just a seat for Shivakumar, Kumaraswamy and Yogeeshwara as well as the parties they represent.

Ever since Shivakumar’s brother, D.K. Suresh, lost the Bengaluru Rural seat in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the state Congress president has been itching to get back against old rivals Deve Gowda and Kumaraswamy, Congress leaders and analysts said.

But poaching Yogeeshwara from the BJP, they added, was also a sign of “panic” from Shivakumar because it makes it seem like he is not confident of winning the bypolls on his strength.

“This seems to be a sign that he has not yet got it (his strength) back,” Narendar Pani, a Bengaluru-based political analyst and faculty at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), told ThePrint.

He added that a deal with Yogeeshwara is “an acceptance of defeat” for Shivakumar. Pani also pointed back to the Lok Sabha elections in which Shivakumar lost nearly all the non-reserved seats in the Vokkaliga belt, barring Hassan, from where Prajwal Revanna, Deve Gowda’s grandson who has been accused of rape, contested.

And though the Congress bettered its tally from one to nine between 2019 and 2024, Shivakumar had pushed hard to win in the Old Mysuru region which would bolster his position as a replacement for Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, if and when he steps down, as well as the “next big leader” of the Vokkaliga community, Pani said.

Shivakumar has styled himself as an alternative to Deve Gowda who also commands significant sway over the group.

Analysts add that Channapatna will help salvage some of this pride as this seat falls in Ramanagara district, a bastion of the JD(S) and particularly, Kumaraswamy.

Shivakumar represents Kanakapura, which is in the same district. But he has not been able to win in other neighbouring seats at least until the 2023 assembly elections when the Congress candidate, H.A. Iqbal Hussain, defeated Kumaraswamy’s son, Nikhil—further fueling tensions between two of Karnataka’s biggest contemporary political leaders.

Shivakumar has even got his way with renaming Ramanagara as Bengaluru South district, trying to undo the legacy of the JD(S) and its first family.

Also Read: JD(S) plays hardball with BJP over assembly bypoll candidature, hinting at cracks within alliance

‘Yogeeshwara denied offer to contest on JD(S) ticket’

Reduced to just 19 seats in the 2023 assembly elections, the JD(S) formally allied with the BJP for the Lok Sabha polls. The alliance managed to win 19 of the 28 parliamentary seats and Kumaraswamy was inducted into Modi’s cabinet with the large and medium industries portfolio.

But his alliance with the BJP was more to revive the JD(S) than allow the BJP access to his strongholds in southern Karnataka from where the party draws most of its political strength. Of the 19 assembly seats the JD(S) won, 14 are in the Old Mysuru region, according to ECI data. The BJP on the other hand has formed the government on two occasions but not with a majority on its own since it fares badly in the Vokkaliga belt, barring Bengaluru.

In the bypolls, the JD(S) attempted to replicate the Bengaluru Rural Lok Sabha seat-sharing model in which a member of the party would contest on a BJP ticket so as to retain the vote base. In Channapatna, too, Kumaraswamy said Tuesday in Bengaluru that he had almost agreed to field Yogeeshwara on a JD(S) ticket.

Yogeeshwara told reporters Wednesday, “In the last 30 years, the JD(S) is a party which I have considered as an opponent. When I was with the Congress and then the BJP, my rival was always the JD(S).”

This was visible even when the BJP wanted to carry out a Padayatra (foot march) from Bengaluru to Mysuru to highlight the allegations of the MUDA scam against Siddaramaiah.

Meanwhile, Nikhil has had two unsuccessful political outings so far—2019 and 2023—and Yogeeshwara jumping ship has raised the pressure on Kumaraswamy.

Having failed to placate Yogeeshwara, Kumaraswamy had to decide if he wanted to field his son, another JD(S) candidate, or cede the seat to the BJP to avoid possible defeat.

‘Education versus irrigation’

In the 2023 assembly elections, Kumaraswamy won from Channapatna, securing 96,592 votes (48.83 percent vote share), as against then BJP candidate Yogeeshwara, who received 80,677 votes (40.79 percent), according to ECI data.

Gangadhar S. of the Congress managed only 15,374 votes, 7.77 percent, of the votes, which demonstrates the sway Yogeeshwara has in the constituency.

Pani said that Yogeeshwara has acted more like an Independent to secure victories instead of relying on the party he used to represent.

The 57-year-old first entered the legislative assembly as an Independent in 1999 and was then elected twice on a Congress ticket in 2004 and 2008. In 2009, he lost the Lok Sabha elections and the 2009 assembly bypolls on a BJP ticket. He then managed to win the 2013 assembly elections on a Mulayam Singh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party ticket. In 2018, he lost the assembly elections on a BJP ticket against Kumaraswamy.

He was instrumental in securing the 17 MLAs who defected from the Congress-JD(S) alliance to the BJP, earning him a seat in the upper house of the state legislature in 2020, followed by a cabinet berth in 2021.

But his politics in Channapatna has been very different from that of any others in the Vokkaliga belt, Pani said.

The Vokkaligas are an agrarian, land-owning community and most of the politics followed by Deve Gowda in these parts is related to farmers, Cauvery River water and irrigation.

“Yogeeshwara’s politics went towards education, especially girl’s education,” Pani said.

The politics in Channapatna, therefore, can be seen as “education versus irrigation”, Pani added. But his joining the Congress is likely to help consolidate the “anti-Deve Gowda” vote, he added. And if this happens, analysts said, Channapatna may well become another chink in the NDA’s fragile alliance in Karnataka.

(Edited by Sanya Mathur)

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