BENGALURU: With the
Congress Central Election Committee (
CEC) meeting late Thursday night to finalise its first list of candidates for
Karnataka assembly elections, chief minister
Siddaramaiah has reportedly managed to pack in almost all his loyalists, leaving senior party functionaries from the state, including his close friend H C Mahadevappa, seething in anger.
Both the
AICC screening committee and CEC meetings are said to have witnessed an aggressive Siddaramaiah refusing to be accommodative of the other camps. “Please approve my list without heeding to pressure from other senior leaders if you want to see the
Congress back in power,” he reportedly told CEC members.
The manner in which Siddaramaiah dominated the candidate-selection process, with the AICC panels only playing a supportive role, has made some members of the CEC compare his style of functioning to that of ex-CMs S Nijalingappa and D Devaraj Urs, who had reduced party affairs to a one-leader show.
The fact that Siddaramaiah has been the first CM in the state to complete his full tenure after Urs, besides his capacity to mobilise all resources, is believed to have had the AICC meekly conceding to his demand for a lion’s share of the tickets for his nominees.
Sources said almost 90% of the Congress candidates list will have the stamp of Siddaramaiah. The AICC is expected to release the first list of 136 candidates on Friday after a final round of talks with the CM, who left for New Delhi on Thursday.
Mahadevappa’s plea for tickets for himself and his son,
Sunil Bose, is unlikely to to be granted. In the last round of CEC meeting, a list of Youth Congress candidates was cut from seven to just “five priority seats”, the sources added. About three women candidates are likely to be named in the first list.