BENGALURU: With the exception of Kolar, the ruling Congress on Saturday finalised its list of nominees to be fielded for the December 27 Council elections. The list includes IT, BT Minister S R Patil from Bagalkot and former Minister Veerakumar Patil from Belagavi.
The party has decided to contest only in 21 of the total 25 seats, and has released a list of 20 nominees, which include 10 sitting members.
The party has denied ticket to three sitting members, Dayananda Reddy (Bengaluru Urban), T John (Kodagu) and Nasir Ahmed (Kolar). It has renominated Allama Prabhu Patil (Kalaburagi), S R Patil (Bagalkot), Veerakumar Patil (Belagavi), A V Gayitri (Chikkamagaluru), Srinivasa Mane and Nagaraj Chebbi (Dharwad), S L Gotnekar (Uttara Kannada), Pratapachandra Shetty (Dakshina Kannada), Raghu Achar (Chitradurga) and Dharmasena (Mysuru).
The other party members who got the party tickets are
L R Shivaramegowda (Mandya), Vijaya Singh (Bidar), Chandramouli (Kodagu), R Rajendra (Tumakuru), M Narayanaswamy (Bengaluru Urban), K C Kondaiah (Ballary), R Prasannakumar (Shivmogga), Basavaraj Itagi (Raichur), S Ravi (Bengaluru Rural) and M A Gopalaswamy (Hassan).
According to party sources, the party high command is yet to take a call on the candidate for the Kolar-Chikkaballapura seat, as intense lobbying is on to clinch the party ticket by the loyalists of two sitting Lok Sabha members, Veerappa Moily and K H Muniyappa.
While Muniyappa is lobbying hard in favour of DCC president Anil Kumar, Moily is exerting pressure on the central party leaders to back his supporter Ramesh. A final decision is likely to be taken on Tuesday, a day before the last day for filing nominations, a KPCC source said.