BENGALURU: If the Congress high command taking action against its minority wing chief Abdul Jabbar is any indication, the party is low in its confidence of winning the Davanagere South seat.
Jabbar has resigned from his post and Chief Minister Siddaramaiah’s political secretary and MLC Naseer Ahmed has also been instructed to step down, according to sources.
In New Delhi, AICC president Mallikarjuna Kharge refused to comment saying he was unaware of the development. Deputy Chief Minister and KPCC president DK Shivakumar in Bengaluru said he would reply after getting the report from the local party authorities. But the high command leaders including AICC general secretary and Karnataka in-charge Randeep Singh Surjewala had already received the report from AICC secretary and state in-charge Abhishek Dutt about the Congress leaders who had tried to sabotage the party’s chances. There were also reports that a considerable chunk of Muslim votes went against the Congress candidate making the result more unpredictable.
There are high chances of other Muslim candidates who were in the fray, including SDPI, securing sizable votes as they, allegedly, had the backing of some Congress leaders. The trend is likely to affect the Grand Old Party (GOP) in the long run and, especially, in the 2028 Assembly polls.
The party’s chief whip in the council, Saleem Ahmed, and others had on Friday in a veiled attack alleged that certain Muslim leaders, with indirect reference to Housing Minister Zameer Ahmed Khan, Naseer Ahmed and Abdul Jabbar, had hatched a conspiracy to defeat the party candidate Samarth Shamanuru in Davanagere South. If Samarth loses the seat on May 4, the pressure is likely to build on the party high command to drop Zameer from the cabinet.
Zameer was sulking as his man Jabbar was denied the ticket and the duo did not campaign for Samarth. Interestingly, except for Siddaramaiah many of his associates did not show as much interest in campaigning in Davanagere South as they did in Bagalkot.
The CM’s camp believes that the party candidate in Bagalkot, Umesh Meti, will win by a slight margin assuming that brisk polling in rural areas where the party has a strong hold and relatively poor turnout in urban areas, the BJP bastions, would help it. An upset for Congress in the bypolls, if it fails to retain the two seats or loses even one of them is likely to create more trouble for the party in Karnataka as it would further the rift between the CM and the DCM, according to political analysts.