The Hindu : Congress, BJP field fresh faces for Dharwad North constituency

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Mar 23, 2004

Karnataka

Karnataka

Congress, BJP field fresh faces for Dharwad North constituency

By M. Madan Mohan

HUBLI, MARCH 22. The BJP and the Congress, the two principal contenders in the Dharwad North Lok Sabha constituency, have swapped the caste card in the selection of candidates for the elections.

The BJP, which won the seat in the past three elections, has chosen a non-Lingayat, Prahlad Joshi, as its nominee this time. The Congress, which usually preferred non-Lingayat candidates before it tasted defeat in the 1996 elections, has chosen a Lingayat candidate, B.S. Patil, former Chief Secretary.

Mr. Joshi is a former President of the Hubli-Dharwad district unit of the BJP. A businessman, he first came into the limelight as the president of the Rashtradhwaja Gourava Samrakshana Samiti, which led a successful campaign to hoist the national flag at the Idgah Maidan here in the Nineties and helped the BJP gain a political foothold in this part of the State.

One of the beneficiaries of the new political base for the BJP in Hubli-Dharwad was Jagadish Shettar, who in his second term representing the Hubli Rural constituency, was catapulted as the Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Assembly because of politics within the BJP and the defeat of B.S. Yediyurappa in the 1999 elections. The political benefit of the flag campaign spilled over to the parliamentary elections also, with the BJP creating history by wresting the Dharwad North Lok Sabha seat from the Congress for the first time in 1996 and retaining the same in 1998 and 1999.

The BJP would have had no problem in finding a candidate for the Dharwad North Lok Sabha seat, had not the incumbent, Vijay Sankeshwar, resigned from the party. Mr. Sankeshwar, who started his own political party, is contesting the Assembly elections from the Hubli Rural constituency against Mr. Shettar.

Initially it was expected that Mr. Shettar would fill the vacancy caused by the exit of Mr. Sankeshwar. But Mr. Shettar was reluctant to contest the Lok Sabha elections. The party then had to look for a new candidate. The only Lingayat candidate available was Chandrakant Bellad, who represented Dharwad in the Legislative Assembly. There were two non-Lingayat candidates: Rajendra Gokhale, State party Secretary, and Mr. Joshi. Mr. Yediyurappa, Chairman of the party's Campaign Committee, backed the candidature of Mr. Bellad.

Two things apparently went against Mr. Bellad. One was that he had been rejected in previous Lok Sabha elections, once as a Janata Dal candidate and then as a BJP candidate. Secondly, there was a lot of resentment against him in party circles.

What was galling to many was that Mr. Bellad became a prominent member of the Akhila Bharata Veerashaiva Mahasabha, which proclaimed that Lingayats were not Hindus.

What made the party chose a non-Lingayat candidate was the positive image of the Prime Minister, A.B. Vajpayee, which had percolated to the rural areas, and the accessibility of Mr. Joshi to party workers and the people at large.

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