Udupi, Aug 8: Even as the political parties are busy in finalising candidates for the 35 wards of the Udupi City Municipal Council (CMC) for August 29 polls, many sitting councillors have lost opportunity to contest again from their wards. Of the 35 wards in the CMC, 17 have been reserved for women this time.
As many as 13 sitting councillors will not be able to fight from their municipal wards thanks to the reservation for the wards announced last week by the state government. Some of these were heavyweights from their parties including M.R. Pai, Dinakar Shetty and Yashpal Suvarna from the BJP and P Yuvaraj from the Congress. Hence, the parties are striving to find candidates from these 13 wards as per reservations.
Both BJP and Congress are holding party workers meetings in the wards to decide on candidates. Prabhakar Poojary, president, Udupi city unit of BJP, said that the party had started its process of holding ward-wise meetings from Monday. Seven meetings already have been held. This process would continue till August 10 by when the party would hold a meeting in every ward.
“We are collecting the opinions of workers on the selection of the candidate. Barring Moodabettu ward, we have more than one contender in the rest of the wards. Wherever there is more than one candidate, we ask them to hold talks and decide who should contest. This is how we selected a candidate for Kola ward,” Mr. Poojary said.
Meanwhile, B. Narasimhamurthy, General Secretary, Udupi District Congress Committee, said the Congress too had been holding ward-wise meetings to choose candidates. “A 10-member committee has been set up in each ward for this purpose. We will complete the selection of candidates by Friday,” he said.
Raghupati Bhat, MLA, and Pramod Madhwaraj, former Minister, are in charge of the BJP and Congress, respectively, in these polls. Yogish Shetty, district JD(S) president, said the JD(S) had already selected candidates for some wards.
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