BENGALURU: The Bharatiya Janata party on late Wednesday night announced four candidates for the upcoming biennial Legislative Council polls.
After the shock it delivered to the state unit in Rajya Sabha polls by picking surprise candidates who did not feature in the Core committee's list, the BJP parliamentary committee has picked all four candidates from the list submitted by the state core committee.
MTB Nagaraj, R Shankar, Sunil Vallyapure and Pratap Simha Nayak have been chosen as candidates. Of the four of them, three are chief minister BS Yediyurappa's personal picks.
With 117 members in the legislative assembly the BJP can elect four MLCs and chief minister BS Yediyurappa can nominate five more to the Council.
MTB Nagaraj and R Shankar had joined the BJP after deserting the Congress-JDS coalition in 2019 and were instrumental in bringing the BS Yediyurappa led BJP government to power in the state.
Yediyurappa had pushed for Sunil Vallyapure's candidate as his reward for stepping back to allow incumbent Gulbarga MP Umesh Jadhav's son Dr Arvind Umesh Jadhav's contest in Chincholi assembly constituency.
Umesh Jadhav too had quit the Congress to join the BJP and defeated Mallikarjun Kharge in the Lok Sabha polls from Gulbarga.
H Vishwanath's candidature that Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa had backed, has been rejected by the central leadership.
H Vishwanath and MTB Nagaraj were given tickets by the BJP to contest in assembly constituencies of Hunsur and Hoskote respectively but has lost in the 2019 bypolls.
Pratap Simha Nayak, president of BJP's Dakshin Kannada unit- the home turf of state BJP chief Nalin Kumar Kateel- is said to be backed by the Sangh as candidate.