Poojary wins Mangalore primaries

 

Mangalore, 09 Mar 2014: Veteran leader B Janardhan Poojary won the Mangalore primaries trouncing his nearest and the lone opponent U Kanachur Monu by a huge margin here on Sunday.

 

With this win, Poojary will be the official Congress candidate for the Mangalore Lok Sabha to take on BJP’s Nalin Kumar Kateel.

 

While Poojary bagged more than 88% of the first preference vote share getting 478 of the 540 valid votes, Monu’s tally was just 62. There were seven invalid votes.

 

Only 547 of the 598 eligible voters for the primaries exercised their franchise at the voting exercise held to choose the candidate for the Mangalore Lok Sabha at the Rosario School Grounds at Pandeshwar here.

 

The exercise was supervised by AICC secretaries Shantaram Naik and Prakash Joshi, with Praneel Nair and Pramod Kumar D being the Lok Sabha Returning officers.

 

LRO Pramod Kumar said: B Janardhan Poojary won the Mangalore primaries. He got more than 50% of the first preference votes, hence he was declared the winner and no count of second preference vote was taken.

 

Poojary was magnanimous in his victory. He told: This is neither a victory for one or defeat for another since we are all Congress members. This exercise was held to elect a candidate. The real task for Congress starts now. We have to concentrate on the big fight ahead. I had told party workers not to raise slogans after the results, since it was a family affair and not a matter of one-upmanship. We have to work together to defeat the communal forces in this region.

 

Monu was not available for comments. Congress sources said that they expected him to win about 60 votes and they came mainly from Sullia and Ullal.

 

Earlier in the morning the process went smoothly ahead with all Congress MLAs, B Ramanath Rai, Abhyachandra Jain, UT Khader, JR Lobo, barring Mohiudeen Bava, exercising their franchise at the eight polling booths set inside the grounds assembly-segment wise. Bava who reached the venue five minutes late past 11am was told by the LROs that he lost his chance to vote. Rai, who had forgotten to get his vote ID was politely told to get the same. His aides got it from Bantwal in time.

 

The LROs had given specific instructions that none of the voters will be allowed after 11am. The voting took place at 11.25am, after each candidate spoke for ten minutes on why they should be given the first preference votes. Since the LROs had divided voters segment-wise, the process got over faster than expected in about an hour and by 1pm the results were declared.

 

10-minute speech: During the 10 minute speech time given to both candidates, Poojary used the Kalladka incident on Saturday to highlight why the party workers should choose a strong leader who can take on communal forces and also speak for them in the Parliament.

 

Monu made an emotional speech saying that some block presidents had told him not to come to the poll venue.