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The April 17 polling in Karnataka, the fifth phase of the General Elections 2014, will decide the electoral fate of several high-profile candidates who are testing waters for the first time in elections. The voters in Bangalore would exercise their franchise to decide if two of the former IT bigwigs – Nandan Nilekani and V Balakrishnan – have a future in politics or not.
Nilekani, former chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) and co-founder of Infosys, and Balakrishnan, former board member of Infosys, are making their debut in the politics by contesting on Congress and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) tickets from Bangalore South and Bangalore Central constituencies respectively. Both of them are new to politics and have promised to bring a big change in the system. (WHO, WHERE, HOW IN CITY...)
Apart from these two, Rizwan Arshad, youth Congress president, Nandini Alva and Abdul Azeem from JD-S, Babu Mathew, Ravi Krishna Reddy and Nina P Nayak from AAP are also testing the electoral waters for the first time.
Alva, widow of former minister Jeevaraj Alva, is contesting for the first time on a JD-S ticket.
Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Ananth Kumar, who has successively won five times is seeking a record 6th term from Bangalore South, while P C Mohan of the BJP, the sitting MP from Bangalore Central, is contesting for the second time. In Bangalore North, D V Sadananda Gowda, former chief minister of Karnataka, is seeking victory. He has already won the Parliament election from Mangalore and Udupi-Chikmagalur in the past.
In Bangalore Rural, D K Suresh of Congress, who won the bypoll in 2013 following the resignation of H D Kumaraswamy after he was elected to state assembly in May last year, is seeking reelection for the second time.
The highlight of this election is the contest from Nandan Nilekani, who had started informal campaigning much before he was formally inducted into the Congress. He had launched a media campaign attracting the attention of Bangalore South voters. Over the last 15 days, he launched a massive door-to-door campaign in the constituency, thereby giving a tough fight to Ananth Kumar of the BJP who had to change his strategy.
The high-decibel campaign witnessed a multimedia campaign strategy adopted by Nilekani with a greater focus on social media and digital channels. The Congress party, which is fighting hard to win a majority of the 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state, engaged all possible strategies to secure a victory for Nilekani. The Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi came down to campaign for Nilekani.
The BJP too brought its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi to campaign in Bangalore. He made two visits to the state in the last week of the campaigning to address public rallies in Bangalore and Chikkaballapur.
The four constituencies of Bangalore -– South, North, Central and Rural — have a combined electorate of 8.35 million. Bangalore South has over 1.83 million voters, Bangalore North has just under 2.4 million voters, Bangalore Central has over 1.93 million and Bangalore Rural has over 2.19 million voters.
