The suicide of sugarcane farmer Vittal Arabhavi, in front of the Suvarna Soudha in Belgaum in November 2013, brought to the fore the woes of the sugarcane farmers in the State. Arabhavi belonged to Kankanwadi village in Raibag taluk of Belgaum district, which comes under Chikkodi Lok Sabha constituency.
After the suicide, there was an uproar in the State Assembly, and the government went on to fix the price of sugarcane.
However, many of the sugar mills in the ‘sugar bowl’ Belgaum district, are yet to adhere to the government’s direction. The district has 22 sugar mills.
In this predominantly agrarian constituency, the ‘farmer’s suicide’ will obviously be a point of debate during the run-up to the elections. Although the headquarters of the revenue subdivision, Chikkodi has remained backward in many respects, except in the number of sugar mills and some educational institutions that it houses.
There are frequent spells of drought and flood here. The people of the district have on several occasions agitated demanding that Chikkodi be carved out as a new district.
Once a Congress bastionComprising eight Assembly segments — Athani, Chikkodi-Sadalga, Hukkeri, Kagwad, Kudachi, Nippani, Raibag and Yamkanmardi — the Chikkodi LS constituency was once a bastion of the Congress before the ‘Janata Dal’ won the seat and subsequently the Bharatiya Janata Party took over.
It was D.A. Katti of Schedule Castes Federation (SCF), who had won here, defeating S.V. Patil of the Congress in 1957 and V.L. Patil registered the first win for the Congress in the constituency in 1962.
RecordNoted Dalit leader from Congress, B. Shankaranand, has a record of sorts in the constituency by winning seven times in a row from 1967 to 1991, and he went on to become Union Minister in the Cabinets headed by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and P.V. Narasimha Rao.
But in 1996, Janata Dal’s Ratnamala Dhareshwar Savanoor ended the Congress monopoly by defeating Mr. Shankaranand, and in 1998, the Lok Shakti candidate Ramesh Jigajinagi defeated Mr. Shankaranand once again.
Mr. Jigajinagi went on to win the next two elections as Janata Dal (United) and BJP candidate in 1999 and 2004 respectively.
The constituency, which was reserved for Scheduled Castes was de-reserved by the delimitation commission and the presidential assent was given in 2008.
With that, the “political dynamics” of Chikkodi Lok Sabha constituency underwent a change as the “dominant” castes such as the Lingayats got a chance to stake a claim for political power in the constituency, which was with Dalit leaders till then.
Consequently BJP’s Lingayat leader Ramesh Katti, younger brother of the former Minister in the BJP Umesh Katti won it in 2009, defeating another Lingayat leader from the Congress, Prakash B. Hukkeri.
Now, it is going to be a repeat of the previous elections as Mr. Hukkeri, now a Minister in the Siddaramaiah Cabinet has been chosen by the party high command to take on Mr. Katti here.
Mr. Hukkeri has reluctantly agreed to contest.
