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Parties busy with candidate selection for Udupi CMC polls

13 councillors can’t fight from their areas due to ward reservations

The Congress, JD(S) and BJP are focused on the process of selecting candidates for 35 wards of the Udupi City Municipal Council (CMC), the polls for which will be held on August 29.

The reservation for the wards announced last week has meant that 13 sitting councillors will not be able to fight from their municipal wards. Some of these were heavyweights from their parties including M.R. Pai, Dinakar Shetty and Yashpal Suvarna from the BJP and P. Yuvaraj from the Congress. Hence, the parties are striving to find candidates from these 13 wards as per reservations. Of the 35 wards in the CMC, as many as 17 have been reserved for women. Hence, the parties will have to find women candidates for these wards.

Both BJP and Congress are holding party workers meetings in the wards to decide on candidates. Prabhakar Poojary, president, Udupi city unit of BJP, told The Hindu that the party had started its process of holding ward-wise meetings from Monday. Seven meetings already have been held. This process would continue till August 10 by when the party would hold a meeting in every ward.

“We are collecting the opinions of workers on the selection of the candidate. Barring Moodabettu ward, we have more than one contender in the rest of the wards. Wherever there is more than one candidate, we ask them to hold talks and decide who should contest. This is how we selected a candidate for Kola ward,” Mr. Poojary said.

Meanwhile, B. Narasimhamurthy, General Secretary, Udupi District Congress Committee, said the Congress too had been holding ward-wise meetings to choose candidates. “A 10-member committee has been set up in each ward for this purpose. We will complete the selection of candidates by Friday,” he said.

Raghupati Bhat, MLA, and Pramod Madhwaraj, former Minister, are in charge of the BJP and Congress, respectively, in these polls. Yogish Shetty, district JD(S) president, said the JD(S) had already selected candidates for some wards. “We will release our first list on Tuesday,” he said.