June 4 (Punjab Khabarnama) : Former Karnataka chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jagdish Shettar won Belgaum Lok Sabha constituency overcoming a challenge from the Congress’s Mrunal Hebbalkar, the son of state’s women and child development minister, Laxmi Hebbalkar.
By around 4pm, Shettar held a lead of 1.60 lakh votes ahead of Hebbalkar.
Shettar, who is contesting from the Belgaum Lok Sabha seat for the first time having previously represented the Hubballi-Dharwad (Central) state assembly seat for six terms, faced challenges from a revived Congress, which is in power in the state, as well as internal dissent within the BJP.
As of 12 noon, Shettar was leading by a margin of 45,616 votes, having polled 242,895 votes versus 197,279 votes.
The seat is currently held by the BJP’s Mangala Angadi, who was elected via a by-election held in 2020 after her husband and Union minister for railways Suresh Angadi passed away in 2019 due to Covid-19.
The seat has been a bastion for the BJP. Ever since Suresh Angadi, then a BJP district president contested and won the Belgaum seat for the first time in 2004, he remained an undisputed contestant from the constituency, winning it four times in a row by an average margin of over 1.5 lakh votes, the biggest being in 2019 when he won the polls by 3.91lakh votes.
The Congress was hopeful that the switch of Lingayat voters that powered the party to win five out of eight assembly seats falling in the Lok Sabha constituency in the 2023 polls would continue for the Lok Sabha polls.
Meanwhile, Union minister Pralhad Joshi was declared elected by a margin of around 97,000 votes defeating the Congress’s Vinod Asooti in neighbouring Dharwad constituency, where BJP has held an iron grip over since the 90s.
This seat saw the murder of Congress corporator’s daughter Neha Hiremath by her former classmate, Fayaz Khoodanaik with the BJP politicising the murder as a case of ‘love jihad’ and blamed the state Congress government of appeasement of the minority community.