Basic Kirwan Surjectivity for K-Contact Manifolds

We prove an analogue of Kirwan surjectivity in the setting of equivariant basic cohomology of K-contact manifolds. If the Reeb vector field induces a free $S^1$-action, the $S^1$-quotient is a symplectic manifold and our result reproduces Kirwan's surjectivity for these symplectic manifolds. We further prove a Tolman-Weitsman type description of the kernel of the basic Kirwan map for $S^1$-actions and show that torus actions on a K-contact manifold that preserve the contact form and admit 0 as a regular value of the contact moment map are equivariantly formal in the basic setting.