Bengaluru: Union Home Minister and senior BJP leader Amit Shah will go on a two-day tour of Karnataka on Friday and will hold a road show at Devanahalli on the outskirts of Bengaluru. The BJP leaders will also take stock of the party’s preparations for the assembly elections to be held in the state on May 10. This is Shah’s first visit to the state after the election schedule was announced on March 29.
As per his schedule of events, Shah will hold a roadshow at the taluk headquarters of Devanahalli, the birthplace of 18th-century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan, in Bengaluru Rural district in the afternoon. BJP sources said Shah would hold a meeting with senior party functionaries here in the evening regarding election preparations.
He is scheduled to attend a program organized by a private news channel on Saturday before returning to New Delhi. In Devanahalli, the Union minister will campaign for BJP’s Pilla Munishampappa, who is pitted against JD(S) sitting MLA LN Narayanaswamy and former Union minister and seven-time MP Congress candidate KH Muniyappa.
Muniyappa, who faced defeat in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, is contesting the assembly elections for the first time. In the 2018 assembly elections, the contest was mainly between Narayanaswamy (86,966 votes) and Venkataswamy (69,956) of the INC. BJP candidate K Nagesh was at the third position with 9,820 votes.
A total of 5,102 nominations have been filed by over 3,600 candidates till Thursday for the May 10 assembly elections in Karnataka. Election officials gave this information here. The process of filing nomination papers began on April 13 with the issue of the election notification. Of the total nominations, 3,327 were filed by 4,710 male candidates and 391 by 304 female candidates. A nomination has been filed by a candidate of “other gender”, the Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer’s office said in a statement on Thursday night.