How Sowmya won, then lost Jayanagar

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: It has been learnt now that former Congress MLA from Jayanagar Sowmya Reddy lost her seat to BJP’s CK Ramamurthy on Saturday after counting of postal ballots. Congress workers had said that Sowmya had won the seat by 160 votes at 2:30 pm in the afternoon at the SSMRV college counting centre in Jayanagar fourth block.

They claimed that the behaviour of the election officers was peculiar because they refused to officially declare a winner initially, which they did by 6 pm and it was still Reddy. Karnataka Congress legal cell representative Jayam Movy said that the returning officer had delayed the issuing of the certificate to the winner which is also not in keeping with the norms.

Furthermore in the evening, Reddy was declared the winner by 294 votes, which was reflected on the Election Commission (EC) website with no postal ballots being mentioned. Reddy was said to have bagged 57,591 votes and Ramamurthy 57,297.

Ramamurthy, however, demanded a recount, insisting that certain postal ballots be counted. Congress legal cell pointed out that the postal ballots are counted before the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) tally is taken into account. Around 6:30 pm or 7 pm, BJP’s Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya joined in the demand for a recount, allegedly in tandem with former minister R Ashoka. This is where things get murky and there are claims and counter-claims from either side.

Congress workers claimed that Surya and Ramamurthy entered the counting centre with cell phones illegally and demanded that discarded postal ballots be recounted. The allegation on part of Reddy supporters is that some postal ballots had been discarded because the seals on them had been broken, besides them not being verified by the presiding officer. They also claim that there had been multiple recounts throwing up different results.

Later on, Sowmya was joined by her father and Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) working president Ramalinga Reddy and in some time Bengaluru Rural MP DK Suresh and KPCC president DK Shivakumar also arrived at the venue. Many reporters and observers agree that Ramamurthy came out of the centre around 11:30 or close to midnight and waved to his supporters and Reddy had looked morose.

After midnight, the returning office declared the BJP candidate the winner by 16 votes and issued a certificate, which was passed around in WhatsApp groups operated by state authorities. Interestingly, the EC website after midnight reflected the postal ballots in which Ramamurthy was seen to have an advantage with 500 votes while Reddy managed an additional 190 votes.

This brought the revised tally to 57,797 for Ramamurthy and 57,781 for Sowmya. Shivakumar, Suresh and Ramalinga Reddy continued to stage a sit-in protesting at the counting centre, claiming several norms were violated in the process.