Typically, a bypoll in a state is expected to go the way of the ruling party on account of its control over government resources, especially in the early part of its tenure. The winds of change are usually apparent only if bypolls are held towards the end of a government’s term.

However, while the Karnataka bypoll results for three seats were on expected lines by this yardstick – the Congress won all the seats, a year-and-a-half after it came to power in Karnataka – they are significant for several reasons.

Given the many problems facing the Congress government, including intra-party tussles, and the BJP’s aggressive attacks against it, the bypolls were being watched closely for what they meant for Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, the two parties, as well as the JD(S) that is fast losing its turf in the state.

Channapatna, Shiggaon and Sandur, for which the bypolls were held, had been won by the JD(S), BJP and Congress, respectively, in the 2023 Assembly elections. The JD(S) is now a BJP ally.

Would the Congress failure to win at least two seats suggest that the party’s prospects were on the wane in Karnataka less than half-way into its term, and that the five guarantees which won the party the 2023 polls were losing their lustre?

Would the JD(S) and BJP manage to split the main vote base of the Congress – the backward classes, Dalits and Muslims – even as the JD(S) retained its hold on the dominant Vokkaliga community in Channapatna, and the BJP on the Lingayats in Shiggaon and Sandur?

Would the bypolls signal the ascendancy of Deputy CM D K Shivakumar as a Vokkaliga leader if the Congress wrested Channapatna from the JD(S), given that the seat’s two-term MLA has been former chief minister H D Kumaraswamy of the family Deve Gowda that has held the community’s loyalty for long? Kumaraswamy’s election to Parliament had necessitated the Channapatna bypoll.

Conversely, if there were bypoll losses, would they signal the beginning of the end of the chief ministership of Siddaramaiah, who remains one of the state’s most popular CMs?

In the end, the Congress won all the seats, falling in three different corners of the state. It wrested Channapatna in South Karnataka and Shiggaon in Central Karnataka by 25,413 and 13,448 votes respectively, and retained Sandur in North Karnataka by 9,649 votes.

The party can now safely claim that it retains its grip on its core constituency of backward class, Dalit and minority voters in Karnataka, with its effective implementation of its five poll guarantees in the 2023 Assembly polls cementing its support base.

This was also evident during the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year, when the Congress increased its tally from one to nine seats (out of 28), falling in the most backward and impoverished constituencies of the state.

As for the Congress’s internal equations, both Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar have reasons to be happy – the CM for having dampened the BJP attacks for now, and his Deputy for having bested the JD(S) on its Channapatna turf. Siddaramaiah will be particularly happy about Shiggaon, where the Congress’s Muslim candidate, Yasir Ahmed Pathan, defeated his BJP predecessor Basavaraj Bommai’s son. Trusted Siddaramaiah supporter Satish Jarkiholi, who is the PWD Minister with self-confessed ambitions for chief ministership come 2028, is believed to have helped swing Shiggaon for the Congress.

The JD(S), whose fortunes continue to tumble, is now staring at a threat to not just its Vokkaliga base but also complete loss of its Muslim votes due to its alliance with the BJP. Kumaraswamy blaming Muslims after the JD(S)’s poor show in the 2023 state polls is believed to have cost his film actor son Nikhil Kumaraswamy the Channapatna seat – the latter’s third consecutive electoral defeat.

Meanwhile, the knives are out in the BJP following the bypoll loss, with rebel leader Basanagouda Patil Yatnal questioning the leadership of state president B Y Vijayendra and his father, former CM B S Yediyurappa.

“I would like the party high command to now at least pay attention to the state… The feedback (that they have) is that Yediyurappa and Vijayendra are major leaders. The people have rejected them in the polls,” Yatnal said.

Nearly half of the population in this Assembly constituency are Vokkaligas, and the JD(S) was expecting to get a bulk of their votes plus at least half of the Muslim voters – the community makes up 25% of the population – to win. Nikhil Kumaraswamy’s opponent in the seat was the party-hopping local strongman, C P Yogeshwar, who contested on the Congress ticket. A three-time former MLA from the region, he has won on both Congress and BJP tickets.

While Yogeshwar, also a Vokkaliga, had won 40% of the votes in the 2023 Assembly polls in a three-way fight, he polled 54% of the votes this time in a direct fight with Nikhil. With Shivakumar lending his weight to Yogeshwar, the JD(S) vote share fell by 6% from 2023.

For the BJP, the results were further evidence that the party does not have a standing of its own in the region, with its past victories here due to the local standing of Yogeshwar.

The tendency of Nikhil to shift constituencies (he migrated to Channapatna only days before the polls) is also believed to have cost the JD(S).

A jubilant Yogeshwar said after the results: “People voted for me despite former PM H D Deve Gowda, who is considered the foremost leader of this region, campaigning for his grandson (Nikhil). This shows that people are opposed to vesting power in a single family.” He also took a swipe at the BJP’s own dynastic politics, with Bommai’s son having suffered defeat.

Nikhil said: “This is my third electoral defeat, and I humbly accept it. I will remain in this constituency and serve the people… Receiving 87,031 votes as a young leader in such a short period is no small feat.”

While the Channapatna win for the Congress was not entirely a surprise on account of Yogeshwar joining forces with Shivakumar, its victory in Shiggaon from where former BJP CM Basavaraj Bommai had won four times consecutively since 2008 was one.

Plus, Bommai’s son Bharat was facing the Congress’s Yasir Pathan, whose candidature had caused heartburn among some in the party.

What changed is that Bommai usually won this seat with a combination of Muslim (20% of the voters) and Lingayat (32%) base. Muslims voted for Bommai on account of the goodwill for his father S R Bommai, a staunch Janata Dal leader. However, Bommai is now in the BJP, which has adopted a stridently Hindutva tone in Karnataka.

After his son Bharat’s loss, Bommai claimed that the Congress won the bypoll “by unleashing a flood of money” and on account of being in power in the state.

Jarkiholi, however, attributed the Congress win in Shiggaon – for the first time since 1994 – to its success in consolidating the votes of the backward classes (22% of the population) and SC/STs (15%) since the conclusion of the Lok Sabha polls.

“We have been working on the ground to consolidate the AHINDA votes (a Kannada acronym for minorities, backward classes and Dalits)… and we have succeeded,” Jarkiholi said.

Pathan’s vote share stood at 52%, an increase of 17 percentage points over the Congress total in the 2023 Assembly polls. Bharat got 45% of the votes, a 9% dip from his father’s tally in 2023.

Shivakumar said the results indicate JD(S) and BJP voters have shifted to the Congress in Channapatna and Shiggaon. “Look at the numbers of the last Assembly elections and the bypolls… How can such a big shift happen without their support?” the Deputy CM said, adding that Muslims can no longer support the JD(S) now that it is with the BJP.

Siddaramaiah also called the Congress win in Shiggaon a defeat of “the communal politics of the BJP”, particularly since the winning candidate is a Muslim. “A secular and pacifist Karnataka helped us win,” the CM said.

He further saw it as a success of his government’s policies. “I am not sitting in an ivory tower, I am constantly interacting with people, the beneficiaries of all our guarantee schemes are happy… The PM lied about them… gave false advertisements in Maharashtra. The people have given their answer.”

In the seat that the Congress was expecting to retain, it was given a tough fight by the BJP. Finally, Annapurna Tukaram, the wife of Bellary Congress MP E Tukaram, won by a narrow margin over the BJP’s Banguru Hanumanthu.

The Sandur battle was seen as a proxy war between Minister and local mining baron Santhosh Lad of the Congress – a close associate of Siddaramaiah – and former BJP minister and also a mining baron, G Janardhan Reddy. The latter recently returned to the BJP after being exiled following his arrest in 2011 in an illegal mining scam.

Sandur, an impoverished region with a nearly 34% SC/ST population, a 34% backward class population and 10% Muslims, has been won consecutively by Congress candidates (Lad and E Tukaram) since 2004. The seat was reserved for the ST community in 2008.

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