Karnataka results won't affect Lok Sabha, Maharashtra Elections reckons Eknath Shinde

The election results in Karnataka will not have any impact on the outcome of the next year's Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly elections, Chief Minister Eknath Shinde said here on Saturday. Speaking to reporters about the Congress's victory in the southern state, Shinde said the BJP had earlier won elections in Meghalaya, Tripura and Nagaland, and the issues in each of these three states were different.

Maharashtra (subsequently) witnessed a government in a coma," he said, in a veiled reference to the Thackeray-led government of the Sena, NCP and Congress. "People in Maharashtra want a government that will work for them. They are intelligent enough to understand the situation," Shinde added."Thus, the results in Karnataka will affect neither Lok Sabha elections nor the (Assembly) elections in Maharashtra," he said. One cannot forecast anything from election results of a single state, he added. 

Congress successfully ran an aggressive campaign against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in Karnataka on the issues of corruption and price rise, winning 135 seats in the 224-member assembly. The grand old improved its vote share by more than four per cent across different regions of Karnataka.In the 2018 elections, Congress garnered a vote share of 38.04 per cent, followed by the BJP (36.22 per cent) and the JD(S) with 18.36 per cent. In the just-concluded polls, Congress' vote share zoomed to 42.88 per cent; that of JD(S) dropped to 13.29 per cent. The BJP, however, was able to hold to its vote share of 36 per cent.