Dakshina Kannada: Cops gear up for assembly polls; security upped at checkposts, sensitive areas

Bengaluru, May 14: After meeting at Bengaluru's Shangri La Hotel to decide the chief minister of Karnataka, the Congress Legislature Party has unanimously decided to leave the selection of Congress Legislature Party leader to the decision of the AICC President, Mallikarjun Kharge. 

The new Karnataka Chief Minister and the cabinet will take oath on Thursday, May 18, sources have said.

Former chief minister Siddaramaiah and KPCC president D K Shivakumar are both front runners for the chief minister's post. 

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had initially appointed former chief minister Sushilkumar Shinde and party leaders Jitendra Singh and Deepak Babaria as observers for the election of the CLP leader in Karnataka.

The supporters of both the Congress leaders slogans outside the Bengaluru hotel where the meeting took place.

Congress General Secretaries Sushil Kumar Shinde, Deepak Babaria and Jitendra Singh Alwar were the observers at the Karnataka Congress Legislature Party meeting.

The Gandhis and Mr Kharge will attend the oath-taking event on Thursday. The Congress has sent invitations to all "like-minded" parties to attend it. The final contours of the Karnataka cabinet will take shape in a day or two, people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Siddaramaiah's supporters have put up a poster outside his home in Bengaluru, referring to him as "the next Chief Minister of Karnataka".

Posters also came up outside Mr Shivakumar's house, wishing "birthday greetings" to "the new Chief Minister of Karnataka". His birthday is tomorrow.

The BJP has been voted out of power in Karnataka, its only bastion in the south until yesterday, when the Congress took 135 seats in the 224-member house.

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.

The scale of the Congress win is a record in terms of both seats and vote share in over 30 years. The party won 135 seats - 55 more than in 2018 - with a vote share of 42.88 per cent. 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.

Mangaluru, May 15: A group of Bajrang Dal workers staged a protest in front of Wenlock Hospital in the city on Sunday after a man, who was undergoing treatment for liver disease died in the hospital. 

Nitin Poojary alias Roopesh (33), a resident of Nelyapalke of Maninalkur village in Bantwal taluk was admitted to hospital last week due to severe stomach ache. 

He was reportedly suffering from severe liver disease and died after three days without responding to any treatment. Nitin was a bus driver by profession. He was also an activist of Bajrang Dal, it is learnt. 

The protesters held the doctors of the hospital responsible for Nitin’s death and demanded an enquiry. They placed the dead body of Nitin in front of the hospital and raised slogans against the doctors. 

Mangaluru: The Puttur town police have detained nine Hindutva activists and are on the lookout for another accused in connection with the case of an alleged derogatory banner. 

Those detained Hindu activists have been identified as Abhi alias Avinash, Shivaram, Chaithresh, Eshwar, Nishanth, Deekshith, Guruprasad, Madhav and Vishwanath.

A black condolence banner with the pictures of former chief minister D V Sadananda Gowda and BJP state president Nalin Kumar Kateel had sprung up near the KSRTC bus stand in Puttur after the May 13 assembly poll results. 

The black banner, decked with a garland of footwear, offered “condolences” to Gowda and Kateel for ensuring a humiliating defeat to the BJP candidate in the Puttur Assembly segment. Due to a triangular contest, BJP candidate Asha Thimmappa Gowda, who polled 37,558 votes, was pushed to third position.

MLA Ashok Kumar Rai Kodambady had polled 66,607 votes and defeated BJP rebel independent candidate Arun Kumar Puthila by a margin of 4,149 votes. The BJP supporters, who have been trolling Kateel on social media, installed the banner taking potshots at the caste miscalculations of both Kateel and Gowda. Later, the Puttur police intervened and had the banner removed.