Eye on Lingayats, B S Yeddyurappa sets foot in Kundgol

With winning both Chincholi and Kundgol assembly seats being a compulsion more than an option for the party, the Bharatiya Janata Party has put in place a plan that will be driven by none other than State president B S Yeddyurappa.
In the next 10 days, the Lingayat strongman will visit both constituencies thrice with the single agenda of consolidating Lingayat votes. Yeddyurappa arrived in Kundgol on Sunday but limited his engagements to meeting local leaders, assessing ground reports and the mood of the electorate. While the Congress is hoping to ride the sympathy wave by fielding late C S Shivalli’s wife Kusuma Shivalli, the single-point agenda for the BJP is now the absolute consolidation of Lingayat votes --- numerically the most dominant electorate in the constituency.
Lingayats are the most dominant community in the constituency with about 82,000 voters followed by Kurubas who constitute about 30,000-35,000 voters. While the Congress is hoping to combine Siddaramaiah’s appeal as a Kuruba strongman, sympathy for Kusuma and joint forces of JD(S) & JD(U) leaders M S Akki and Hazrath Ali Jodmani to retain the seat adding a few thousand votes to their candidate, the BJP is hoping to mend the mistakes it made in the 2018 assembly elections which led to the party losing the seat with barely 634 votes.

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