However, it now looks that he has found allies in his rivals – former minister Basavaraj Rayareddy, MLA Malikayya Guttedar, MLA, and A.S. Patil Nadahalli, MLA, among others.Katti made identical calls earlier, but received little backing from his party.
As a Belagavi politician, Umesh Katti has continued to win with his seventh victory at this Assembly vote, a feat achieved with a few politicians such as Dharam Singh (late chief minister) and Mallikarjun Kharge (senior congressman).
This time, he faced a stiff rival in Hukkeri’s experienced Congressman Mr A B Patil, but Hukkeri could not halt his eighth term as lawmaker. While both men in the majority Lingayat constituency are popular Lingayat leaders, most of them were behind Mr. Katti’s displeasure at congressional government’s claimed attempts to politize the issue of a separate community religion tag.
After his dad, the head of the Janata Dal, Vishwanath Katti, joined politics in 1985, Umesh Katti won his first by-election in the same year by 21,000 votes as candidate of the Janata Dal and won 3 more on the ticket before becoming a BJP in 2004. But soon after, he lost Hukkeri’s election in 2004 by a measly 900 votes. However, he won the following three elections, the last in 2013 by a margin of 57,000 votes.
Mr Katti, the Chikkodi mass leader, was able to relate to the people through the two sugar plants owned by his family in Chikkodi. His family has also been prominent in the cooperative movement since his father was Hukkeri’s MLA in the beginning of the 1980s. His brother, Ramesh Katti, who was President of the District Credit Cooperative Bank (DCC Bank), won the Chikkodi Parliamentary Election of Lok Sabha in 2009, but lost his last Lok Sabha Congressional Election to Mr Prakash Hukkeri.