Bengaluru: Children of two former chief ministers will be in the contest for the Shimoga Lok Sabha seat, with BJP on Wednesday fielding its sitting MP and veteran BJP leader B S Yediyurappa’s son B Y Raghavendra.
The Congress has named former Chief Minister late S Bangarappa’s daughter Geetha Shivarajkumar, who is the wife of Karnataka film star Shivarajkumar and daughter-in-law of Kannada thespian late Rajkumar.
Raghavendra has been elected to Parliament from Shimoga three times. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and in the 2018 by-election, he defeated Geetha’s brother Madhu Bangarappa, who is now the minister in the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government. Madhu was then with JD(S).
Raghavendra, in his first Lok Sabha election in 2009, had defeated S Bangarappa.
Geetha had earlier contested from the seat on the JD(S) ticket in 2014 and lost against Yediyurappa by a huge margin. She had come third in that election behind Congress candidate Manjunath Bhandary.