Development has not been an issue in Bidar

Source: The Hindu -:-




Byelection being held due to death of Gurupadappa Nagamarapalli, BJP MLA

With the Election Commission announcing by-election to the Bidar Assembly seat, politicians in this border district seem to have got busy. Bidar is among the 12 Assembly seats that will witness byelections in eight States in February.

Voting in Bidar will be held on February 13.

The vacancy was created by the death of Gurupadappa Nagamarapalli, BJP MLA, on November 27. This is the third byelection to the Assembly seat and the first to be held due to the death of an incumbent.

No party has yet announced its candidates, though there are some developments in political circles of various hues.

The development of Bidar taluk, considered backward by the D. M Nanjundappa committee, has seldom been the poll promise of candidates. Issues like communal tension and Lingayat domination have dominated the elections in Bidar that has the maximum number of minority votes after Mangaluru. The death of Nagamarapalli may have added the sympathy factor to the list of issues this time.

Nagamarapalli and Veerashetty Kushnoor were the only two Lingayats to go to the Vidhana Soudha from Bidar. But Lingayat voters have tilted the scales in each of the 15 elections held till now.

The city known for its multi-culturalism and multi-linguistic residents, has chosen two Kurubas, a Vaishya and a Kanauji Brahmin and a Marathi Brahmin to represent them in the Assembly.

The high percentage of Muslims in the city, which was the capital of the Behmani and the Baridshahi Sultans for five centuries, is another issue that gains currency before elections.

Candidates and their followers raise questions of how five Muslim MLAs have been chosen from Bidar while it is not so in neighbouring districts.

Polarisation of votes on religious lines has been a constant trend. It began with the pre –poll communal violence in 1967 that led to the defeat of Maqsood Ali Khan. Trader Chandrakanth Sindhol was among the first Jan Sangh MLAs to be elected to the State assembly that year.





Mohammad Shafioddin (Congress) 1952

Maqsood Ali Khan (Congress) 1957 and 1962

Chandrakanth Sindhol (Jan Sangh) 1967

Manikrao Phulekar (Congress) 1972

Veerashetty Kushnoor (Congress) 1978

Mohsin Quamal (Congress) 1982

Narayan Rao Mannalli (BJP) 1983

Mohammad Laiquddin (Congress) 1985

Narayan Rao Mannalli (BJP) 1989

Syed Zulfikar Hashmi (BSP) 1994

Ramesh Kumar Pande (BJP) 1999

Bandeppa Kashempur (Independent) 2004

Gurupadappa Nagamarapalli (Congress) 2008

Rahim Khan (Congress) 2009

Gurupadappa Nagamarapalli (BJP) 2013






Source: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/development-has-not-been-an-issue-in-bidar/article8118413.ece







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