Growth of BJP in Mahadevapura is organic: Limbavali

As the Mahadevapura Assembly Constituency of Bengaluru is now in the thick of a national political row over allegations of “vote theft”, Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Minister Arvind Limbavali has argued that the BJP’s vote has consistently increased here in the last four Assembly and Lok Sabha polls.

Addressing a press conference here, Mr. Limbavali, who earlier represented this seat which is presently represented by his wife, maintained that the growth of the BJP’s vote share as well as political influence in the constituency that has sizeable migrant population was “organic”.

He noted that Mahadevapura Assembly seat, carved out in 2008, had seen four elections since then for the Assembly and Lok Sabha. The BJP had not only won in all the four Assembly elections and polled highest votes from this segment in all the four Parliamentary polls, but its votes as well as winning margin too had increased, he said.

In an obvious effort to counter to the allegations that additions to the voters’ list was huge, he pointed out that the constituency too was growing fast, which was evident with the fact that its revenue collections had increased from ₹361 crore in 2016-17 to ₹885 crore in 2024-25. In the same period, the number of properties in this constituency had increased from 1.48 lakh to 3.59 lakh, he said.

He termed as “factually incorrect” Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s allegations that the Congress was leading in four of the eight Assembly segments coming under the Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha seat and that it lost this seat after the BJP gained a huge lead in Mahadevapura Assembly segment alone. “In fact, it was the BJP which was leading in four Assembly segments of Rajajinagar, Gandhinagar, C. V. Raman Nagar and Mahadevapura,” Mr. Limbavali contended.

Countering the allegations of Mr. Gandhi that there were several houses that showed the residential address as “00”, he claimed there were several such cases even in Varuna that is represented by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and the constituencies represented by Congress MLAs. “Should we conclude that Mr. Siddaramaiah has won with the help of fake voters?” he asked.