Tejasvi Surya, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) south Bengaluru MP and youth morcha president, has been omitted from the list of star campaigners for the Karnataka Assembly Elections 2023. The exclusion is surprising given that he was the BJP’s star campaigner in Tripura. The list, which includes Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, and others, is missing Surya’s name. Surya is known for his strong Hindutva politics and his comments attacking Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah have made headlines. Congress has responded to the omission by calling him the ‘naftari Chintu’ and saying that nobody cares for him in his own state.
Surya, who was elected to the Lok Sabha at the age of 28, is a lawyer by training and profession. He was chosen to represent the Bengaluru South constituency in 2019 over former minister Ananth Kumar’s wife, after Kumar died in 2018. Surya was recently in the news when he accidentally opened the emergency exit of an IndiGo aircraft, causing a delay. However, it was clarified officially that he did not open the emergency exit deliberately. His co-passenger, Tamil Nadu BJP chief K Annamalai, claimed that Surya noticed and fixed a glitch in the aircraft and then apologized to passengers for the delay.
The upcoming Karnataka Assembly Election is high-stakes for both the BJP and Congress, and both parties are fielding star campaigners. In Congress’s list, Sachin Pilot has been omitted after he held a fast against the Rajasthan government. The exclusion of Surya and Pilot from their respective party’s star campaigner lists has caught the media’s attention.
