Local leaders make their presence felt
THE Congress’ thumping victory in the Karnataka Assembly elections has ensured that it will form the government on its own in the state. The last time it happened was in 2013; before that, back in 1999, the Congress won the election and formed the government headed by SM Krishna; later, Dharam Singh took over. The intervening period was marked by various coalitions struck by the principal players — the BJP, the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular). The uneasy alliances often threw the state, notable for the strides it has made in information technology and infrastructure, into political and administrative disarray.
The Cong breached the BJP’s Lingayat stronghold and took away a considerable chunk of the votes of the Vokkaligas.
Of the 224 Assembly seats, the Congress won 135, way ahead of the BJP (66). The JD(S), with 19 seats, was a distant third. The 7 per cent vote swing towards the Congress reflects the degree to which the party consolidated its position among the castes and communities that tilt the balance of power, dashing the BJP’s hopes of a last-minute upset.
It is apparent that the Congress’ victory cannot be attributed solely to the support of a few castes and communities. It breached the BJP’s Lingayat stronghold and took away a considerable chunk of the votes of the other dominant group — the Vokkaligas. The defeat suffered by Nikhil Kumaraswamy, the son of former CM and JD(S) leader HD Kumaraswamy, from the Vokkaliga-dominated seat of Ramanagara at the hands of the Congress’ Iqbal Hussain testified to the breakthrough the party made in a community whose fealty it lost with the exit of SM Krishna and the rise of the JD(S). Indeed, the movement of the Lingayats and the Vokkaligas towards the Congress proved that it transcended an earlier coalition of the Backward Castes, Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims, knit together by a former CM, Siddaramaiah. The coalition, christened AHINDA, symbolised a caste divide between the well-off castes and the under-empowered social groupings.
The 2023 outcome has exposed the BJP’s failure to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims by the single-minded pursuit of a one-point agenda that revolved around the forcible removal of the hijab among girl students in schools and colleges that led to dropouts; enforcing a ban on the selling of meat; resurrecting old temple-mosque disputes; and rewriting history, primarily to portray Tipu Sultan as a persecutor of Hindus. The BJP’s faith-driven programme was finally overlaid with the charge that the Congress’ promise to ban Sangh Parivar outfit Bajrang Dal amounted to humiliating Lord Hanuman, an allegation that was highlighted by its top leaders in the election campaign. Communalism lost to the infirmities of governance; corruption in the government’s higher echelons, which the Congress emphasised in its pushback, was encapsulated in the ‘40 per cent commission sarkar’ slogan.
The BJP replaced midstream its CM, BS Yediyurappa, with a younger leader, Basavaraj Bommai, hoping that the Lingayat support would remain intact (like Yediyurappa, Bommai is from the Lingayat community). The move underlined the perils of over-centralisation, a characteristic of the present BJP regime, which appoints CMs without allowing regional leaders to grow organically — a throwback to the era of PM Indira Gandhi. Bommai joined the BJP in 2008 after quitting the Janata Dal (United). Like his Assam counterpart Himanta Biswa Sarma, a former Congressman, Bommai endorsed and implemented the party high command’s instructions to the letter, particularly the Hindutva agenda.
On the other hand, Yediyurappa was the one who raised the BJP in Karnataka, like what Keshubhai Patel and Shankersinh Vaghela did in Gujarat. The BJP’s central leaders belatedly realised the folly of marginalising Yediyurappa and made amends by giving his son, BS Vijayendra, the ticket in the Assembly polls and the veteran himself a role in the campaign.
But it was too little, too late. The Lingayats had begun shifting towards the Congress, shaking the pillar that held the BJP aloft for decades.
The JD(S) had again made calculations to emerge as the ‘kingmaker’ in case Karnataka threw up a fractured verdict. It contested 200 of the 224 seats, hoping to eat into the Congress’ minority votes. The Muslims and Christians rallied behind the Congress, while the JD(S) forfeited its own Vokkaliga base to the Congress in the process.
Even in victory, the Congress has lessons to learn from Karnataka. Its state leaders credited the success to the Gandhis, particularly Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra that criss-crossed the state. Karnataka Congress president DK Shivakumar tearfully recalled Sonia Gandhi calling on him in the Tihar jail where he was detained by the Enforcement Directorate in a money laundering case. But was this mammoth win possible without the leadership of Siddaramaiah, Shivakumar and others? Did the anointment of Mallikarjun Kharge as the Congress president play a role in garnering votes in the Hyderabad-Karnataka region to which he belongs? For decades, the Congress paid the price for publicly putting down veteran Veerendra Patil, a Lingayat. The community had turned its back on the party.
The Gandhis and the Congress have got the adrenaline rush they badly needed and this fact cannot be sidestepped in the ultimate analysis. It is the states that make up the ‘high command’ — be it of the Congress or the BJP. It is not tenable for both parties to ignore the Yediyurappas, Vasundhara Rajes, Kamal Naths and Shivraj Singh Chouhans and enforce their writ through cherry-picked nominees.
