BENGALURU: With the formation of Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) and five corporations and the total number of wards in the city to be around 500, it is a jackpot for smaller parties to make a mark in theupcoming elections to the corporations.
Each ward will have approximately 20,000 population and parties like Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), Karnataka Rashtra Samiti (KRS) and Bengaluru Navanirmana Party (BNP) see the elections as a great opportunity and say this is the right time for fresh faces to enter the political arena and win. They said that from the political perspective, smaller wards are advantageous to smaller parties.
National Joint Secretary of AAP, Prithvi Reddy, said, “Earlier, politicians from traditional parties had a lot of advantage. Even if the wards were reserved for women, they fielded their wives to continue their domination with money and muscle power. Their fiefdom will be challenged with existing 198 wards split into 500 new wards. It will be a level playing ground, as bigger parties and their candidates will not have any major advantage on their side like earlier.”
He said, “Each ward is expected to have around 20,000 population, with around 10,000 voters, which means candidates have to visit approximately 2,000 houses. Even if a candidate visits 50 houses in person in a day for his door-to-door campaign, he can cover 2,000 houses in about 40 days, a time given from the election notification to the day of voting, without spending a lot of money.”
‘Small wards will encourage more freshers to contest as poll expenditure will be less’
Reddy said they started preparing the ground for the corporation elections three years ago and there were more than one aspirant for the 198 wards then, and that identifying candidates is not a big task for AAP.
Srikanth Narasimhan, founder and general secretary of Bengaluru Navanirmana Party (BNP), said the problem with larger wards was that they had to reach out to a large number of people and traditional political parties in that setup always had an advantage.
“The more the number of smaller wards, the better it is for new faces, as candidates can establish a personal connection with the smaller population easily. Smaller wards with a small geographical area means we need to reach out to a smaller population, which is easy. Smaller parties like us, who have been working in the field on various issues bothering Bengaluru and its citizens, have an advantage,” he said, and added that BNP is optimistic of winning at least 50 seats.
Deepak CN, president, Karnataka Rashtra Samiti (KRS), said, “We see the corporation elections as a great opportunity to come to power. The advantages of traditional parties will be negated with the ward boundaries redrawn. Also, the winning margin comes down drastically with smaller wards.”
He said they are in constant touch with people and doing groundwork, which they consider as their key to success. “There are many who want to enter the political fray, but are scared of spending a fortune on campaigns. With smaller wards, the election expenditure will be small and this will encourage more freshers to contest,” he added.
While AAP and KRS leaders said the corporation election is a springboard, where the path for a corporator to become an MLA and MP is made easy, BNP said the people’s voting pattern differs from one election to another.