BENGALURU: The ruling BJP and the main opposition Congress are evenly poised, bagging 11 Council seats each of the 25 that went to polls, but when it comes to vote share, the former is far behind. Surprisingly, the JDS, which won only two of the six seats it contested, too secured 43.17 pc votes.
Of the total 98,774 votes polled (99.7 per cent polling recorded), the Congress garnered 44,225 votes, accounting for 44.7 per cent votes share, as against the BJP's 38,394 votes, which is about 38.8 per cent. The Congress has managed to stay ahead of the ruling dispensation with 5.9 per cent more votes by convincing the electorate - all elected representatives from local bodies.
The average votes per constituency is 2,212 for the Congress while it is 1,919 for the BJP in the 20 seats that both parties had contested.
The Congress won many of the seats by huge margins. In Belagavi, Hubballi and Vijayapura, the party's candidates Channaraj Hattiholi (3,718 votes) Saleem Ahmed (3,334) and Sunilgouda Patil (3,245), respectively, won comfortably. In Tumakuru, the party's candidate won by 1,085 votes while in the dual-member Mysuru-Chamarajanagar seat, the winning margin was 946 votes.
In contrast, in some of the seats where the BJP has won, including Chikkamagaluru, the winning margin was as low as six votes. The highest number of votes for the BJP were polled for Social Welfare Minister Kota Srinivas Pujary (3,672) in the Dakshina Kannada-Udupi dual-member seat.
Another factor affecting BJP's vote share is its candidates in the Old Mysuru region like Mandya performing poorly as its candidate Bookanahalli Manju was able to get a mere 50 votes and HM Vishwanath got 421 votes in Hassan.
"Apparently, our vote share is higher than the BJP's as we won with a good margin and lost by a narrow margin in many seats," remarked KPCC vice president Prof. KE Radhakrishna. But the KPCC media wing, based on its own calculations, claimed that the party had bagged 48 per cent vote share while the BJP had got 41 per cent.
In the six seats that it contested, the JDS secured 43.17 pc votes, which means that it is still an alternative to BJP in these seats. The latter was pushed to third place including in Bengaluru Rural, where its candidate B C Narayanaswamy garnered a mere 54 votes. The JDS has managed to garner 10,751 votes, at an average of 1,791 votes per constituency.
Except for Lakhan Jarkhiholi, who won from the Belagavi dual-member seat with 2,552 votes, and Mallikarjuna Haveri in Dharwad (1,217 votes) none of the other Independents could make any impact.