Karnataka polls: SDPI releases list of 10 candidates, says open to tie-up with non-BJP parties

SDPI state president Abdul Majeed KH, who was one of the outfit’s two candidates in the last Assembly elections, will contest from Narasimharaja in Mysuru. The other candidates in the first list are BR Bhaskar Prasad (Pulakeshinagar), Abdul Hannan (Sarvagnanagar), Ilyas Mohammed (Bantwal), Alfanso Franco (Moodabidri), Akbar Belthangadi (Belthangady), Haneef Mulur (Kapu), Ismail Zabiulla (Davangere south), Balekai Srinivas (Chitradurga), and Nazeer Khan (Vijayanagar).

The outfit plans to contest 100 constituencies in total. The 54 seats it announced on Sunday are mostly in the regions of coastal Karnataka, Bengaluru, and old Mysuru.

SDPI national president MK Faizy said, “The BJP has no agenda. It only has communal hatred as its agenda. The proof of this is that the state president of the BJP has asked people not to ask for development, roads, and sewerage, but to discuss love jihad.”

Responding to the allegation that the BJP would benefit from the SDPI contesting, he asked why the same fears were not expressed when it came to the Congress or the Janata Dal (Secular). “We will do our politics,” Faizy added.

Asked if the BJP-led government did not ban the SDPI because of political calculations, Faizy said the RSS was banned when the Babri Masjid was demolished but not the BJP. He demanded an answer from the Congress on this.

Abdul Majeed said the candidate selection process was underway in the 44 constituencies where candidates were not announced on Sunday. “Last time, the SDPI contested only two constituencies to support secular parties. But, we have seen how 14 MLAs from the Congress and three JD(S) MLAs sold out when they came to power,” he said.

The SDPI leader alleged that Congress did not have the strength to retain its MLAs. “The SDPI has been doing politics through an ideological struggle for the past 13 years without any compromise. This time we will go directly in front of the people,” Majeed said.

He said the party’s aim was clean governance without corruption and so far the party had 300 elected representatives in local bodies. “All of them are giving corruption-free governance,” Majeed said. “Similarly, candidates of our party who will get elected as MLAs will also provide corruption-free governance. There is no application fee for candidates at our party. There is no provision to submit applications for any of the candidates. Instead, we have kept the tradition of giving tickets to those who are involved in public works in society. A candidate does not go to the polls at his own expense. Instead, the party will face elections.”