Bommai must win over a dozen seats in Council polls to save his chair

By Shyam Sundar Vattam | NT

Bengaluru: With the loss of the Hangal seat in recent bypolls earlier this month still hanging over his head, Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai’s biggest challenge will be to redeem himself by winning the maximum number of seats in the upcoming Council elections, set for December 10.

If the CM manages to bag more than ten seats of the total 25 seats which are going to the polls in two weeks, then the party high command may entrust him with being the face of the 2023 Assembly elections. If he fails to make a good showing, the Delhi leaders will have no choice but to go for a collective leadership for the poll campaign. The high command has been upset ever since the CM lost the Hangal seat to the Congress, despite being in power. Soon after the by-poll results, Bommai was summoned by BJP National President J.P.Nadda to Delhi to give an explanation for losing the seat that they had won in the 2018 Assembly polls.

Party sources told News Trail that it was true that there was a lot of responsibility on the CM to prove his mettle by winning over a dozen seats. For this reason, he had been visiting districts to address the workers conventions at least two to three days in a week. The frequency of the visits are expected to go up next week as only ten days would be left for the polling. The CM himself has raised the stakes by asking all his cabinet colleagues to keep all other work aside, and to fully focus on the Council polls. Teams have been constituted for each constituency to personally interact with the elected representatives of local bodies and persuade them to vote for the saffron party.