The Congress won the Karnataka assembly election 2023

Bengaluru:

The new Karnataka Chief Minister and the cabinet will take oath on Thursday, sources said.

The Gandhis and national Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge will attend the event. The Congress has sent invitations to all “like-minded” parties to attend the oath-taking event.

The final contours of the Karnataka cabinet will take shape in a day or two, people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The BJP has been voted out of power in Karnataka, its only bastion in the south until yesterday, when the Congress took 135 seats in the 224-member house.

The BJP won only 66 seats, down from 104 in the 2018 state election. It did not win a single seat reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST) category. Karnataka has 51 reserved constituencies, out of which 36 are for Scheduled Castes (SC) candidates and 15 for ST candidates.

The Congress called a meeting of its MLAs today to discuss who would be the Chief Minister.

The Congress Legislature Party (CLP) is expected to pass a resolution leaving it to the Congress national president to decide the Chief Minister pick. No final decision will be taken today, but the views of all MLAs will be ascertained, sources said.

Congress General Secretaries Sushil Kumar Shinde, Deepak Babaria and Jitendra Singh Alwar are the observers of the Karnataka CLP meeting.

Congress leaders DK Shivakumar and Siddaramaiah have expressed interest for the top post, raising concerns over a stand-off if the matter is not resolved.

Mr Shivakumar has gone with his family and brother, Congress MP from Bangalore Rural DK Suresh, to a temple 120 km away from the state capital Bengaluru.

Siddaramaiah’s supporters have put up a poster outside his home in Bengaluru, referring to him as “the next Chief Minister of Karnataka”.

Posters also came up outside Mr Shivakumar’s house, wishing “birthday greetings” to “the new Chief Minister of Karnataka”. His birthday is tomorrow.

The scale of the Congress win is a record in terms of both seats and vote share in over 30 years. The party won 135 seats – 55 more than in 2018 – with a vote share of 42.88 per cent. The closest the Congress came to this score was in 1999 when it won 132 seats and had a vote share of 40.84 per cent. In 1989, it won 178 seats with a vote share of 43.76 per cent.