Bengaluru, 27 Feb

Congress won three seats and BJP one in the Rajya Sabha elections in Karnataka on Tuesday, which were marred by cross-voting in a setback to the saffron party.

Ajay Maken, GC Chandrasekhar and Syed Naseer Hussain, all from Congress, and Narayansa K Bhandage (BJP) got elected to the Upper House in the polls in which elected MLAs were the voters.

Bhandage secured 48 votes and Maken got 47 votes. Meanwhile, both Hussain and Chandrashekhar received a total of 46 votes each. Five candidates, including D Kupendra Reddy of JD(S) who lost the election, were in the fray for the four seats.

BJP MLA ST Somashekar voted for Maken, while another party legislator A Shivaram Hebbar abstained.

BJP said it was exploring the possibility of taking legal action them and lodging a complaint with the Speaker UT Khader seeking their disqualification from the Assembly for violating the whip issued to them to vote in favour of the party candidate. Somashekar had earlier quit Congress and joined BJP. He served as a minister in the previous BJP government and was made the Mysuru district in-charge minister back then. He and Hebbar had in fact distanced themselves from BJP in recent months, and increasingly began identifying with Congress.

BJP (66 MLAs) and JD(S) (19 MLAs) combined had fielded Kupendra though they did not have the requisite votes to get him elected. NDA partners said they were expecting "conscience votes", apparently from the rival Congress camp, in favour of Reddy. Congress has 134 members in the Assembly. There are also four others members, including two independents.

Somashekar said he heard the "voice of his conscience" and voted in favour of the Congress, "which built schools and carried out developmental works in his constituency". Hebbar too abstained from voting adhering to his conscience, he said.

Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar, who is also the State Congress chief, ridiculed the BJP and the JD(S) saying, "'Conscience vote seekers' have become 'conscience vote givers'."

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah hit out at JD(S), alleging that the party sought to lure and threaten its MLAs. "JDS needs 45 votes (for their candidate) to win. Do they have that many votes? Even though they don't have enough votes, they still fielded the candidate and are luring our MLAs. Do they have a conscience?" the chief minister asked. "An FIR has been lodged regarding the threat to us," Siddaramaiah said.

Former chief minister and JD(S) second-in-command H D Kumaraswamy said the FIR against Kupendra and his aides was registered at Vidhana Soudha police station. Kumaraswamy said the complainant MLA did not say that he was lured, but that some other MLAs were "approached".