Udupi, Mar 22: Former minister and Congress leader Pramod Madhwaraj, who was defeated in recently Assembly polls from Udupi constituency, is now JD(S) candidate from Udupi-Chikkamagaluru constituency. Congress has reportedly given permission to Madhwaraj to contest with JDS ticket after ceding the constituency to the later as part of seat sharing deal.
The coalition candidate will now take on Shobha Karandlaje, who has been re-nominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Though Ms. Karandlaje was considered as a frontrunner to contest for the seat, there was some suspense as the names of two other party leaders were also doing the rounds. In the case of the JD(S)–Congress coalition, the selection was more complicated as the Congress is stronger in the constituency than the JD(S), though the latter was given the seat under the seat-sharing arrangement.
In the 2014 parliamentary election, Ms. Karandlaje had won the Udupi–Chikkamagaluru seat in 2014 by a margin of 1.81 lakh by defeating the then Congress candidate K. Jayaprakash Hegde, who is now with the BJP. Late V. Dhananjaya Kumar, as the JD(S) candidate, who recently passed away after joining Congress, had got only 14,895 votes.
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