CPI(M) Announced List of 19 Candidates For Karnataka Assembly Elections

For the May 12 assembly polls in Karnataka, the CPI(M) said that the party will be contesting in 19 out of total 224 constituencies and announced the list of contesting candidates. The left party said that its cadre will be supporting “strongest candidates” to defeat the BJP in the remaining seats.

GV Sreerama Reddy, CPI(M) Karnataka State Secretary and party’s central committee member said that seventeen out of nineteen candidates are young and all the party’s nominees have potential to succeed in the elections. Speaking to Newsclick, Sreerama Reddy said that the struggles led by the party in the last five years helped it grow the party’s base in the state while registering an increase in membership of the party as well as its affiliated organisations.

Explaining about the CPI(M) work in the state, Sreerama Reddy said that they have led numerous movements by raising issues of peasants, workers, women and the threat of communalism, among others, while pressurizing both the Central and the State governments. “On January 30 this year, CPIM along with other organisations had organised ‘human chain for harmony’ across the state covering all districts to highlight the threat to communal harmony in which nearly 2 lakh people participated,” he said.

Taking on the saffron party, Sreerama Reddy said that the state voters will not take the BJP seriously. “The communal polarization tactic of the BJP has been exposed in Karnataka and the voters will not take their propaganda seriously,” he said.

Sreerama Reddy will be contesting from Bagepalli in Chikkaballapura district, the constituency he had earlier won in 1994 and 2004 elections. In March, the CPI(M) organised a rally in Bagepalli in which thousands of people participated. In the previous 2013 elections, CPI(M) lost in all 16 seats it contested registering less than one percent vote share.

The CPI(M) had recently held a central committee meeting in New Delhi before announcing its action plan for Karnataka elections. Its general secretary Sitaram Yechury said that the party’s main objective would be to defeat the BJP. “Apart from the seats that we are contesting, we have decided to support the strongest candidate who would be in a position to defeat the BJP. Where we are not contesting, our priority would be to defeat the BJP and communal combination,” Yechury said.

The 19 seats where the CPI(M) is contesting are from the districts – Chickaballapur, Gulbarga, South Canara, Koppala, Bangalore South, Bangalore North, Udipi, Kolar, Bellari, Uttara Kannada and Gadag district. The left party is reaching out to the voters by campaigning on the line – progress through harmony.

The CPI(M)’s electoral strategy in the constituencies where it did not field candidates would benefit strong anti-BJP candidates of Congress and JD(S).