BENGALURU: The Congress is likely to give the party ticket for Shanthinagar assembly segment in Bengaluru to sitting MLA N A Haris, despite his son being in jail for brutally assaulting a fellow customer at a hotel in Bengaluru about a month ago.“We conducted a survey even after the assault and found that Haris was still the most acceptable candidate in the constituency, so we are likely to go ahead with him. This is pending the High Command’s approval of course,” a Congress source told ET.This reflects the “winnability criteria” which the Congress’s candidate selection committee chief Madhusudhan Mistry and state campaign committee head D K Shivakumar have been emphasising as the main criterion to get party tickets. The state election committee headed by Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee president G Parameshwara held a series of meetings at a resort outside Bengaluru to screen and identify party candidates for the 224 assembly segments that will go to polls in May.Other than nearly 40 seats where the Congress is not certain about candidates who can win, including about four assembly segments (Yelahanka, C V Raman Nagar, Chamarajpet, Pulikeshinagar) in Bengaluru city, two or three aspirants with potential have been for each seat. The 43-member election committee has been split into four groups to tackle Bengaluru, Mysuru, Belgaavi and Kalaburagi divisions.Congress state working president Dinesh Gundu Rao said: "We discussed the names for the 90 constituencies that we lost in 2013. We will discuss our sitting MLAs and the rebel JD(S) MLAs who are with us in another meeting on March 26."A cabinet minister involved in the deliberations told ET: “There are no issues like one family cannot get more than one ticket. We. We need to win this election and form government here. We are looking purely at the ground, taking feedback from party workers and surveys and selecting the best possible candidate?.”Several children of Congress leaders including chief minister Siddaramaiah’s son Yathindra (Varuna), home minister Ramalinga Reddy’s daughter Sowmya (Jayanagar) and PWD minister H C Mahadevappa’s son Sunil Bose (T Narsipura) are aspirants, while their parents seek the ticket for other constituencies. The Congress already has two father-son sets of sitting MLAs -- Shamanur Shivashankarappa and horticulture minister S S Mallikarjuna in Davanagere, housing minister M Krishnappa and his son Priya Krishna in Bengaluru.The party has had to wade through 1,570 applicants for the 224 constituencies, even in segments where the Congress is not particularly strong. The finalised list is to be taken to New Delhi for the High Command’s approval later this month. Shivakumar said before the meetings began: “We will announce our entire list of candidates by the end of this month.”