Modi's Mangaluru rally today: Can he wrest coastal Karnataka from Congress?

Undoubtedly, it is one of the most beautiful regions in the country. Whichever way you chose to traverse its landscape – hopping on passenger trains at one of those quaint little railway stations, driving through narrow roads winding through paddy fields, coconut groves gliding over pellucid streams, or hiking through inviting rain forests to catch a glimpse of the calm Arabian sea glistening in the sun – coastal Karnataka is a delight for the senses. This is also core Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) territory in the state. The region borders Kerala and the border is where the RSS ideology faces resistance from the Communists culminating in bloody consequences and political killings.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been focusing his energies on this coastal region, whose three Parliamentary constituencies – Uttara Kannada, Udupi-Chikamagulur and Dakshina Kannada – contain 24 Assembly constituencies. This may be a fraction of Karnataka’s 224 seats but at stake for Modi and his party would be pride. That’s because the Congress virtually decimated the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in this region in the 2013 Assembly elections. The BJP, riding high on the ‘Modi wave’, spectacularly reclaimed these Assembly segments in the 2014 Parliamentary elections.