Bengaluru: Divya Spandana, actress and former member of parliament from Mandya, is among a host star campaigners whose names have been announced by the Congress party for the upcoming assembly elections in Karnataka, scheduled to be held on 10 May.
Spandana, better known by her screen name of Ramya, has been missing in action since quitting her post of the Congress’s social media cell in-charge in 2019. She had also deactivated her Twitter account for about a year, before making a return to social media in 2020.
She is one of 40 star campaigners for the upcoming Karnataka polls, whose names were announced by the party Wednesday. The list includes political activist and former student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, former captain of the Indian cricket team Mohammed Azaruddin, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, actor and party leader Raj Babbar and Rajya Sabha member and former Union finance minister P. Chidambaram, among others.
Other names on the list include Congress president Mallikarjuna Kharge and senior party leaders Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, who will join a host of state and national leaders in the campaign.
The party has also included the name of former Karnataka Chief Minister and BJP leader Jagadish Shettar, who joined the Congress days ago, in the campaigner’s list. Shettar is also the party’s candidate in the Hubballi-Dharwad Central constituency in northern Karnataka.
One name missing from the list is that of Sachin Pilot’s. Pilot had featured in the Congress’s list of star campaigners for Karnataka in the 2018 elections, for the 2021 Kerala Assembly elections, and also for last year’s Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh elections.
The 45-year-old leader from Rajasthan has been staging a protest against the Ashok Gehlot-led Congress government in his home state, accusing it of not probing corruption cases of the earlier BJP regime.
The list of Congress’s star campaigners was announced the same day as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) released its list of 40 star campaigners for the Karnataka polls.
The BJP list includes the names of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union ministers Amit Shah and Nitin Gadkari, Chief Ministers Yogi Adityanath, Himnata Biswa Sharma and Shivraj Singh Chouhan and former Karnataka Chief Ministers B.S. Yediyurappa and D.V. Sadananda Gowda, among others.
Interestingly, firebrand Bengaluru South MP and national BJP youth president Tejasvi Surya’s name is missing from the list.
Political observers are linking it to the flak drawn by Surya for “accidentally” opening the emergency door of an aircraft in December. Earlier this week, the BJP MP had challenged Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to promote Nandini milk in Kerala if his appreciation of Karnataka’s dairy brand was genuine. He had also hit out at former Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah for urging the central government to ensure the safe return of stranded Indian nationals in Sudan.
Meanwhile on Wednesday, BJP national president J.P. Nadda and popular Kannada actor, Kicha Sudeep, also took part in a roadshow to support Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai’s filing of nomination from the Shiggaon seat.
Surprise and fighting discontent
The Congress’s list of star campaigners surprised some of its own legislators, who called it a “once in a blue moon list”, claiming several of those who feature on the list do not have any clout. This includes Spandana, they alleged.
Ramya joined the Youth Congress in 2012 and was elected as an MP in the August 2013 Lok Sabha by-elections. She later moved to Delhi and took over as the head of the party’s social media cell in-charge, after losing the 2014 general elections.
Though known for her hard-hitting posts on social media, she had also often courted controversy for the same, as when she compared a photo of PM Modi with the Statue of Unity to bird-dropping.
In 2018, she created a buzz when she temporarily removed her Twitter bio, where she described herself as “handling Social Media & Digital Communications for the Congress party”, leading to speculations that she had quit from her position, especially in the light of the fact that she hadn’t been going to her 15, Gurudwara Rakab Ganj Road office for a few days.
Within days, however, she had restored the bio and returned to office.
In 2020, after returning to social media after a year’s absence, she had told ThePrint in an interview that she wouldn’t be a part of either films or politics anymore.
A senior Congress office bearer, however, told ThePrint Wednesday, on condition of anonymity that “she has been with the party and has agreed to campaign for the Congress in the upcoming elections”.
Meanwhile, the BJP, with its list of star campaigners, has tried to contain dissent among its ranks by including K.S. Eshwrappa, Prabhakar Kore, Arvind Limbavali and Basangouda Patil Yatnal, sources in the party told ThePrint.
Eshwarappa, Limbavali and Kore were left out of the party’s candidate list which saw protests and a significant amount of disillusionment among their supporters.
Yatnal, on the other hand, has been a vocal critic of B.S. Yediyurappa and Basavaraj Bommai and had agitated against the BJP government over the Panchamasali reservation row.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
Also read: ‘Left, right, touchables, others’ — how divisions among SCs are impacting Karnataka politics