Bengaluru, 20 March

Senior Congress Muslim legislators, including Tanveer Sait and Naseer Ahmed, on Friday put up a strong pitch before AICC General Secretary Karnataka in-charge Randeep Singh Surjewala to give the Davangere South assembly bypoll ticket to the community.

Surjewala was in Bengaluru to hold discussions with Congress State President and Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar on candidates for Davangere South and Bagalkot Assembly seats, to which the byelections will be held on 9 April. The vacancies were caused following the deaths of sitting MLAs Shamnur S Shivashankarappa from Davangere South and HY Meti from Bagalkot. The last date for filing the nomination papers is 23 March.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had promised the families of Shivashankarappa and Meti that the tickets would be given to them.

Muslims have been demanding the Davangere South seat, as there are nearly 70,000 minority votes out of the total 2,32,564 electorate. The demand by Muslims for the ticket has been consistent since 2008, when Davangere South and North constituencies were carved out in the delimitation exercise. High drama prevailed during the 2008 assembly polls for the Davangere North seat, resulting in the Congress not contesting the seat as the nomination papers of the official candidate were rejected.

In 2008, Congress had flown the requisite ‘B’ form from Bengaluru to Davangere by helicopter at the last minute to hand it over to the official candidate, Syed Saifullah. As the late Shivashankarappa was contesting from Davangere South, he wanted the Davangere North ticket for his son SS Mallikarjun, who is a minister in Siddaramaiah's cabinet now. Reportedly under duress, Saifullah himself struck out his name in the ‘B’ form and wrote Mallikarjun's, which was invalidated during scrutiny of the nomination papers.

Meanwhile, Congress functionary MT Subhash Chandra has written a letter to Congress leader Sonia Gandhi recalling the 2008 incident where the party had to go without a candidate. In the letter, he has mentioned how Shivashankarappa's daughter-in-law, Prabha Mallikarjun, could get elected from the Davangere Lok Sabha seat with the help of three lakh Muslim votes in 2024. "Due to this historical background, we are demanding that the ticket be given to party MLC K Abdul Jabbar,'' he added.

“If the ticket is denied to a Muslim candidate this time and given to Shivashankarappa's grandson Samarth Shivashankarappa, there will be strong resentment from the community and other backward classes, who constitute 80 per cent of the voters,” Chandra said. Meanwhile, Samarth entered the fray even before the Congress announced the official candidate by filing his nomination papers on Friday. He filed the papers as an Independent candidate without the requisite ‘B’ form. The BJP, playing on the AHINDA votes, has fielded Srinivas T Dasakariyappa, a Nayak.