In what may be seen as a new precedence, the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee has collected over Rs 25 crores from over 1250 ticket aspirants from the party. Monday was the last date to receive applications from prospective candidates for the 2023 assembly elections in the state.
Sources in the party told The Daily Guardian that former chief minister and Congress legislative party leader Siddaramaiah too filed the application mentioning Badami, Kolar, and Varuna as tentative constituencies from where he aspires to fight. However, he also mentioned that the high command may take the final decision on the seat.
His application has come in after the deadline was revised last week and he was asked to file his application leaving the choice of constituency open as he had reasoned this for not filing the application. Siddaramaiah had come under severe criticism from his bête noirs and from leaders within the party for showing reluctance to zero in on the constituency from which he would contest.
KPCC president D.K. Shivakumar has filed his application to contest from Kanakpura, which he has been holding successfully for the last three terms earlier to this he was representing Sathnur.
Each applicant was supposed to deposit Rs 2 lakh in the form of demand draft along with the application fee of Rs 5000 whereas for SC/STs the deposit money was lowered to Rs 50,000 and Rs 1 lakh. Defending the move, KPCC president Shivakumar has said that this corpus would be used for election expenses. Much of the electorate bonds were garnered by the BJP and Congress got very little from donors and corporate so we had to come up with some kind of mechanism to raise funds,’’ he told this paper. When asked about the modalities of shortlisting the candidates, he said the screening of candidates will be done by Allam Veerabadrappa who heads the committee and the names will be forwarded to the high command which will take the final call. Responding to queries about Siddaramaiah announcing names in five constituencies in north Karnataka, the Veerabadrappa said that no one has the mandate to declare names.Neither I nor Siddaramaiah has the right to announce names. The high command has the final say. I don’t know in what context he has said this. I will collect all the information and then make comments. I assume that he was speaking in support of those who lost elections last time just to lift the spirits of the party workers,’’ he said.
The KPCC thus far has received over 1250 applicants. Sitting MLAs, defeated candidates, new aspirants, and in some cases candidates whose families have traditionally been with the Congress, some kin of sitting MLAs have also approached. Interestingly three sitting MLAs from JDS – Shrinivasa Gowda from Kolar, Gubbi Srinivas from Tumkur, and Shivalinge Gowda of Arasikere have put in their applications and all three are Vokkaligas.