As expected, industrialist, Dr Vijay Mallya has made it to the Rajya Sabha along with M. Venkaiah Naidu and Aayanur Manjunath of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Oscar Fernandes of the Congress party.
Dr Mallya recorded 5,920 votes and Mr Fernandes got only 5,000 votes. The Rajya Sabha results has once again proved that Dr Mallya, a Kannadiga, has a good rapport with all the political parties. In 2002, he had won a tougher RS election than this year’s. He did manage to defeat the official candidate of BJP, D.K. Taradevi Siddhartha then.
The political implication of this election is: the Congress party’s doors are likely to closed for Janata Dal (S) and particularly, its state unit chief, H.D. Kumaraswamy. The Congress party would hold parleys with Mr Kumaraswamy whenever the national party wanted to open channel with the JD-S. With Mr Kumaraswamy embarrassing the Congress party in the RS elections, he seems to have lost the hopes of joining the UPA government as Cabinet minister or getting any other incentive from the UPA government.
Sources in the Janata Dal (S) explained in detail as to why JD-S decided to take a revenge against the Congress party for the ill-treatment meted out to it in the past. “The Congress party insulted us in the Legislative Council elections from local bodies’ constituencies. Even for the RS elections, it was the Congress party that invited us for talks. But, they never gave respect to us. Besides this, the Congress party insinuated our party supremo, H.D. Deve Gowda on several occasions. Thats why we decided to teach them a lesson,” party spokesperson, Y.S.V. Datta said. At the hindsight, sources in the party said that the talks between the Congress and JD-S was a pretence because much before the talks took place, Mr Kumaraswamy had promised Dr Mallya of his party’s support. Mr Kumaraswamy came closer to Dr Mallya during social gatherings in New Delhi after the former became Lok Sabha MP.