Congress may face rebel independent candidates

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: Congress is facing the prospect of rebel leaders contesting as independents in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

The probability of rebel candidates cropping up came in the backdrop of the Grand Old Party disclosing 24 names for 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

Chamarajanagara, Kolar, Chikkaballapura and Ballari are the only seats for which candidates have not been announced by the party. The Congress ticket for Bagalkote has become a bone of contention.

The party announced Samyukta, the daughter of Minister for Textiles, Sugar and Agricultural Marketing Shivanand Patil, as the candidate for the seat. She will be taking on incumbent BJP MP PC Gaddigoudar.

This has irked Veena Kashappanavar, who had contested against Gaddigoudar in the 2019 general elections and lost by more than 1,68,000 votes. Veena is the wife of Vijayanand Kashappanavar, Congress MLA from Hungund, which falls in Bagalkote district.

Veena is all set to meet Chief Minister Siddaramaiah in the days to come. Apparently, she has given an ultimatum to Congress leadership that if they don’t replace her name with Samyukta Patil’s for the Bagalkote ticket, she will contest as an independent.

Excise Minister RB Timmapur, an MLA from Mudhol in the same district, is also trying to mollify the Kashappanavars.

On the other hand, Congressman A Bartholomew is planning to contest as an independent from Bengaluru Central, where the party had announced Mansoor Khan as the candidate.

Mansoor is the son of former Union Minister K Rahman Khan. The other hopeful for the seat was Haris Nalapad, the Karnataka Pradesh Youth Congress Committee president and son of Shanti Nagar MLA NA Haris. However, Nalapad doesn’t appear to be thinking of contesting as an independent.

His father NA Haris, the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) chairman, is known to be in the camp of Deputy CM DK Shivakumar.