Bharatiya Janata Party candidate C K Ramamurthy won the Jayanagar Assembly seat in Karnataka by a slender margin of 16 votes against his Congress rival Sowmya Reddy on Saturday, as per the latest official figures.
The elections to 224 Assembly seats in the state was held on May 10 and the polled votes were taken up for counting on Saturday. The results of the rest of the constituencies were declared and the Congress Party emerged a winner in 136 seats.
According to reports, after several rounds of recounting Sowmya Reddy was in the lead with a narrow margin of 294 votes. This is when Congress started celebrating but the BJP asked for a recount.The Election Commission ordered the recounting of postal ballots in the Jayanagar constituency.
“The result was announced by the officials at the Counting Centre at S S M R V College in Jayanagar” late on Saturday, a state Information Department official said in a statement about the Jayanagar constituency vote counting.
Tension prevailed when the counting was taking place as the Congress state president D K Shivakumar along with state unit working president Ramalinga Reddy, who is also the father of Sowmya Reddy, and many other leaders staged a demonstration outside the polling booth, demanding justice.
D K Shivakumar claimed that the election officials distorted the results on the pretext of the recount.They alleged misuse of government machinery to favour Ramamurthy.
After the recount, the voting count of the two candidates, the numbers were a lot different than before. Sowmya Reddy dropped from 57,591 to 57,781 votes and Election officials declared Ramamurthy as the winner with a count of 57,797 votes. The two candidates stood with a difference of just 16 votes.
Congress worker Srivastava tweeted regarding the matter claiming that Reddy won “fair and square” and that BJP manipulated the system. With this, the Congress has won 135 seats in the 224-member Karnataka Assembly. The BJP has won 66 seats and the JD(S) 19, according to the Election Commission.
(WIth PTI inputs)
