Karnataka Chief Minister DK Shivakumar with former state Chief Minister Siddaramaiah during the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting. Photo: PTI
Resort politics is back as Congress, JD(S) lock down MLAs before high-stakes Council polls
Fearing cross-voting, JDS and Congress have spirited their MLAs to amusement parks and luxury golf clubs as the polls is a fierce 8-candidate scramble for 7 seats
The HD Kumaraswamy-led JD(S) is playing it safe ahead of the crucial Legislative Council elections to be held tomorrow (June 18), it appears.
Fearing cross-voting, the party is packing its MLAs off to the luxury Prestige Golf Club Resort near Devanahalli in Bengaluru tonight.
Senior leaders are also expected to conduct late-night strategy sessions for these legislators to ensure no one breaks ranks before the big vote.
Congress too shifts its MLAs
It is not just the JDS who is falling back on resort politics. The state's political temperature soared yesterday after the ruling Congress party too preemptively shifted its legislators to the Terrea Resort on Mysuru Road.
Situated roughly 28 km from Bengaluru within the Wonderla amusement park premises, the resort was chosen following a critical Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting. The strategy mimics earlier containment efforts, aimed at keeping the party ranks unified ahead of the fiercely contested polling.
The intense caution stems from a numbers game in the upcoming Legislative Council elections, where eight candidates are competing for seven vacancies.
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To secure a win, each candidate must log a minimum of 28 first-preference votes.
One contested seat
While house floor math guarantees the Congress four comfortable victories and the BJP two, the final seventh seat remains highly contested.
The Congress is aggressively targeting a fifth seat victory, while the JD(S) has fielded its own candidate for the same slot. Because neither party possesses the required baseline numbers to claim the final seat independently, the contest has devolved into a high-stakes scramble vulnerable to cross-voting and strategic floor management.
Council election
The election is the Karnataka Legislative Council Biennial Election (specifically under the MLAs' quota, where members of the state Legislative Assembly vote to elect members of the Upper House).
The eight candidates competing for seven open seats in the Council are five candidates from the Congress - Thippannappa Kamknoor, Shivanna BS, Vinay Karthik Prakash, PV Mohan, and BK Hariprasad; two candidates from the BJP - Lingaraj Patil and Raghu R, and JD(S) has one candidate, Govindaraju.
Because there are eight candidates fighting for only seven seats—and neither Congress nor the JD(S) has the clear baseline numbers to win that final 7th seat entirely on their own—it has triggered the fierce "resort politics" scramble to lock down MLAs and prevent any cross-voting.