Both DK Shivakumar and Siddaramaiah have made no secret of their ambition to become CM.
New Delhi:
After registering a thumping win in Karnataka, the acid test for Congress now would be picking the chief minister with both state chief DK Shivakumar and senior leader Siddaramaiah eyeing the spot. A team of observers appointed by Congress met all the newly-elected Karnataka MLAs on Sunday to get their vote on who should get the top spot. The team is now heading to Delhi for discussions with the national leadership, which includes Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Sonia Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, and Rahul Gandhi.
With the lobbying for the Chief Minister set to shift to Delhi, both Mr Shivakumar and Siddaramaiah are also expected in the national capital later today to meet the party’s leadership. According to sources, both the leaders though have been asked to wait and only come to Delhi if called by the party.
“Still haven’t decided whether to go or not,” DK Shivakumar told reporters when asked if he would visit Delhi today.
The decision will finally be taken by Mr Kharge, the party announced after the meeting of its Karnataka MLAs yesterday evening. Congress General Secretaries Sushil Kumar Shinde, Deepak Babaria, and Jitendra Singh Alwar were the observers at the meeting.
The supporters of both DK Shivakumar and Siddaramaiah shouted slogans outside the Bengaluru hotel where the meeting took place.
The new Karnataka Chief Minister and the cabinet will take oath on Thursday, sources have said.
Both eight-time MLA Mr Shivakumar and former chief minister Siddaramaiah have made no secret of their ambition to become Chief Minister and had been involved in a game of political one-upmanship in the past.
While the 60-year-old DK Shivakumar is considered to be a “troubleshooter” for the Congress, Siddaramaiah has a pan-Karnataka appeal.
The Congress had entered the campaign phase with the challenge of keeping at bay the factionalism. After winning 135 seats in the 224-member Karnataka assembly, the party put up a united front with Mr Kharge and the two CM hopefuls addressing the media and party workers together.
The scale of the Congress win is a record in terms of both seats and vote share in over 30 years. The closest the Congress came to this score was in 1999 when it won 132 seats and had a vote share of 40.84 per cent. In 1989, it won 178 seats with a vote share of 43.76 per cent.
The BJP won only 66 seats, down from 104 in the 2018 state election. It did not win a single seat reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST) category. Karnataka has 51 reserved constituencies, out of which 36 are for Scheduled Castes (SC) candidates and 15 for ST candidates.
