PANAJI
C T Ravi, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national general secretary in-charge of Goa, was among a number of stalwarts of the saffron party who lost in the Karnataka assembly elections results of which were declared on May 13.
Ravi lost by a margin of 5,926 votes from his Chikmagalur constituency to Congress candidate H D Thammaiah, who incidentally had quit the BJP on the eve of the polls to join the rival party and secure its ticket.
Ravi's nemesis is said to be a close aide of the BJP's towering Karnataka leader B S Yeddurappa, whom the party sidelined in the run-up to the polls.
The Congress in Goa, meanwhile, hailed the defeat of Ravi by the people of Karnataka and claimed it was a punishment for his role in "murdering democracy" by being a mastermind of the two mass defections which took place here -- July 2019 and September 2022.
GPCC president, Amit Patkar claimed that Ravi was the one who engineered the defections and the people of Karnataka have shown him the door.
In September last year, eight of the 11 Congress MLAs, including the then Opposition Leader, Michael Lobo and former chief minister Digambar Kamat, 'split' from the party and 'merged' with the BJP in September last year barely six months after the assembly election result.
Earlier in 2019, 10 of the 15 Congress MLAs, including the then Opposition Leader Chandrakant (Babu) Kavlekar, had similarly split and merged with the saffron party. Ravi was in-charge of the Goa desk then too.
