It will be for the first time in recent decades that the Mysuru parliamentary constituency will witness a direct fight in which the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) combine will be pitted against the BJP if one ignores the slew of independents and political parties on the fringes.
Though Mysuru was traditionally a Congress bastion, the gradual rise of the BJP across the political landscape in the country had its impact in this constituency as well and the party wrested the seat for the first time in the 1998 elections.
Subsequently, it won on two more occasions – in 2004 and 2014 when the constituency used to witness a triangular fight involving the Congress, BJP, and the Janata Party in its different avatars, including the Janata Dal since 1996.
But statistics indicate that the combined vote share of the Congress and the Janata Dal has been numerically higher than what the BJP had harvested in all the elections that it won since 1998. Hence, political observers are of the view that the ensuing battle between the Congress-JD(S) combine against the BJP will be an interesting tussle in which the latter cannot have it easy.
It was in the 1998 elections that the BJP first breached the Congress citadel and its candidate C.H. Vijayashankar- now being fielded as a Congress candidate – polled 3.55,846 votes against his nearest rival S. Chikkamadu of the Congress who got 2,52,822. The Janata Dal candidate was G.T. Deve Gowda who secured 2,23,385 votes and the combined vote share of both the Congress and the Janata Dal surpassed the number of votes polled by the BJP by a huge margin.
The fringe political parties and the Independent candidates could not muster more than 12,000 votes put together in a constituency of nearly 12.4 lakh voters.
The second time the BJP won was in 2004 elections when the victory margin was hardly 10,000 votes and Mr. Vijayashankar polled 3,16,442 votes as against 306,292 votes by A.S. Guruswamy of the JD(S) while Srikantadatta Narasimharaja Wadiyar of the Congress secured 2,99,227 votes and trailed in the third place. But the combined votes of both the Congress and the JD(S) was higher than the votes secured by the BJP.
In the 2014 elections, BJP candidate Pratap Simha polled 5,03,908 votes while A.H. Vishwanath of the Congress trailed behind him by securing 4,72,300 votes. Combining the votes polled by the JD(S) candidate S.Chandrashekaraiah who secured 1,38,587 votes, the Congress-JD(S) combination had a higher vote share in a constituency of nearly 17.23 lakh voters. Of the 15 candidates in fray, the next highest number of votes polled was by C. Mohan Kumar who secured 13,637 votes while the rest polled between 5,600 and 978 votes which reinforced the triangular nature of the contest despite multitude of candidates in the fray. And the BJP has always won when the opposition was divided and hence it would be interesting to see if the BJP can ward off the challenge posed by a combined opposition in Mysuru.
Though statistics are against it, BJP functionaries aver that despite pretensions of being united, the shadow boxing of the JD(S) and the Congress continues and will be reflected in the polling as well to benefit the BJP.
‘Campaign strategy’
“We have a campaign strategy in place which will also neutralise the factors that benefited the JD(S),” said a functionary, declining to elaborate further.
He said that people would vote for a strong and decisive government at the Centre, thus hinting that the BJP would also depend on the Modi factor to swing the results in its favour.