The Congress has received a much-needed shot in the arm just months ahead of the Karnataka elections with the entry of U.B. Banakar, a long-time loyalist of BJP veteran B.S. Yediyurappa and a prominent face of the Lingayat community who belongs to the home district of chief minister Basavaraj Bommai.
Banakar was inducted into the Congress by state president D.K. Shivakumar and former Speaker K.B. Koliwad at the party office in Bangalore on Monday. Shivakumar claimed it was only the beginning of the outflow from the BJP.
“Everyone has been saying no one would join the Congress. But there’s a long list of leaders waiting to join us,” he said.
State Congress spokesman M. Lakshman told The Telegraph on Tuesday that 32 leaders, including 18 incumbent MLAs from the BJP and the JDS, were waiting to join his party.
“Six of the 18 MLAs are from the BJP and the rest from the JDS. So it’s not as if nobody wants to join the Congress,” Lakshman said.
“The MLAs among them would join only in February while the others could join once our party’s scrutiny committee gives the nod,” he added.
Banakar resigned from the BJP two weeks ago, inflicting a jolt to the chief minister since he is an influential leader of the Lingayat community.
Banakar had represented the Hirekerur Assembly constituency twice, in 1994 as a BJP candidate and in 2013 on the ticket of Yediyurappa’s breakaway Karnataka Janata Party.
Although he returned to the BJP along with Yediyurappa, he narrowly lost to B.C. Patil of the Congress in 2018.
Patil is one of the 14 Congress lawmakers who defected to the BJP in 2019, triggering the collapse of the Janata Dal Secular-Congress coalition government. Banakar had simultaneously resigned as chairman of the Karnataka Warehousing Corporation and director of the Veerashaiva Lingayat Development Corporation, a body that Yediyurappa and the BJP have been nurturing since the community has been its key vote bank.
The entry of Patil and the prominence he acquired in the BJP has led to serious differences with the old guard including Banakar, which is the principal reason for his exit from the BJP. But Yediyurappa has been silent on the resignation of his loyalist.
Lakshman said everyone joining the Congress should be ready to work at any level. But he made an exception for Banakar.
“He is the most prominent Lingayat leader in Hirekerur and has a good chance of getting the party ticket,” he said.