On Friday, the Congress party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will face off in the Karnataka election. The second phase of the Lok Sabha elections is taking place in 14 of the state’s 28 parliamentary seats. The voting for these seats started at 7 a.m. The grand old party is contesting all 14 seats, while the saffron camp has 11 candidates and the JD (S) has three (Hassan, Mandya, and Kolar).
Unlike the triangular struggle in the Assembly elections last year, the general election will be fought directly between the BJP-JD (S) coalition and the Congress. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the partnership of Congress and JD(S) won just one seat each in these 14 seats, while the BJP got 11.
Tejasvi Surya, Shobha Karandlaje, Soumya Reddy, DK Suresh, Prajwal Revanna, Shreyas Patel, and Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar are among the key contenders to watch in Karnataka’s first phase of voting.
Karnataka’s constituencies voting in Phase 2 are Udupi-Chikmagalur, Dakshina Kannada, Chitradurga, Tumkur, Mysore, Chamarajanagar, Bangalore Rural, Bangalore North, Bangalore Central, Bangalore South, Hassan, Mandya, Kolar, and Chikkballapur.