On New Year’s Eve, Rajinikanth promised to take a ‘spiritual’ plunge into politics, and a ragtag bunch of angry young men and women — their ranks swelling fast — descended on New Delhi’s Parliament Street. They had an audacious message. The nation wants new faces, they seemed to say, in a throwback to the 1960s. It’s a significant message in a year that’s filled with a series of elections including polls to the Assemblies of Karnataka, Meghalaya and Tripura, where if the BJP emerges victorious or even as a force to reckon with, it would signal the wider acceptance of the saffron ideology in new territories — in Congress-run Meghalaya and Left-held Tripura.
Karnataka is an old saffron laboratory. If it slips from the Congress’ grasp, Rahul Gandhi will surely get more time to spread love and brotherhood. Whatever campaign strategy the GOP adopts, it’s unlikely to be Rahul-centric. Which is why chief minister Siddaramaiah is grappling with BJP chief Amit Shah. Karnataka, like all other states, has both a local and a national political ecology. Siddaramaiah has surprisingly managed to stymie infighting in the party, a typical Congress genetic disorder. Unlike in Meghalaya and Tripura, the Congress is not facing large-scale defections to the saffron camp in Karnataka.
But Siddaramaiah has other problems. Coastal Karnataka is on fire. Uttara Kannada and Indira Gandhi’s old constituency Chikmagalur are not what they used to be. Communal divisions have grown stark. On top of that, the Lingayat-Veerashaiva tussle — into which Siddaramaiah walked in with a promise to grant the Lingayats a separate religious identity — is a double-edged sword. Luckily, the committee set up to look at the issue will submit its report only post-elections.
A restive Janata Dal (Secular) is also a bother. Out of power for years now, Deve Gowda and his son H D Kumaraswamy are not averse to a saffron embrace. Kumaraswamy, a close aide claims, wants to focus on just 80-90 seats that can be won. The BJP too would not be contesting all 224 seats. So an alliance — the first hint of which came in that midnight GST session where Deve Gowda was given a seat next to PM Modi — is possible.
Union minister Piyush Goyal’s recent meeting with Gowda reinforced the rumour. Add to these the traditional urban apathy to the Congress. So Siddaramaiah’s re-election is by no means a cinch. What may help him is the infighting in the BJP. Despite Shah wielding the stick and warning local satraps not to get at each other’s throats, no one has fallen in line. One of the major grouses of the rank and file is Yeddyurappa. It seems he is only promoting his former colleagues in the KJP (Karnataka Janata Paksha), now merged back into the BJP. That is why Shah is talking up Hindutva issues, and roping in Yogi Adityanath for the campaign, forcing Siddaramaiah to retaliate.
But a possible BJP-JD(S) tie-up could yield a side-benefit to the Congress, with the JD(S)’s Muslim vote bank shifting towards it. That’s why Siddaramaiah may opt for a covert, if not overt, alliance with a regional Muslim outfit. Kumaraswamy is mindful of this: on the record, he maintains that the JD-S will have no truck with either the BJP or the Congress. But in the event of a hung Assembly — though unclear mandates have become a rather rare phenomenon — he may get to play the coveted role of kingmaker. Whichever way it goes, Karnataka will prove to be the next big battleground after Gujarat.
The small state of Tripura has its own unique history, and this election will go down as a significant chapter in the history of Indian democracy. Chief Minister Manik Sarkar, a year shy of 70, is fighting his toughest election yet, going by the crowds at Shah’s recent rallies. Strong anti-incumbency, the worsening law and order situation, the recent killings of journalists, are all factors.
And the RSS has put in years of diligent ground work too. The key figure for the BJP in Tripura is not so much Shah or Himanta Biswa Sarma but an innocuous-looking grassroots Sangh worker, Sunil Deodhar. A Maharashtrian from Pune, Deodhar, the Sangh pointsperson in Agartala, speaks all languages of the state (and a lot else of the Northeast) fluently. So, communicating is not an issue for the BJP. “Deodhar is our Mamatadi — he’ll bring down the Left,” say pro-BJP tribal leaders in Tripura.
The BJP is tied up with two local outfits. In addition, Shah has loosened the purse-strings and opened the floodgates to admit renegades from every party, particularly the Congress and TMC. So, the Congress, enfeebled by defections, is not even in the fight.
But the call for change is nowhere as strong as in Meghalaya. Former Lok Sabha Speaker P A Sagma’s son Conrad Sangma jokes that his NPP (National People’s Party) and the BJP, alliance partners, have already started discussing the likely dates of the swearing-in ceremony. After half of the Congress walked over to the NPP/BJP, 53-year-old CM Mukul Sangma is seen to be living on borrowed time.
Some claim that the Congress turncoats jumped ship because of the CM’s style of functioning. Much like former Haryana CM Bhupinder Hooda, Mukul Sangma never shared the spoils of power. The NGT ban on coal mining and the initial GST levied on natural brooms — Meghalaya is the biggest supplier of ‘jhaadus’ to the rest of India — hit local trade badly.
The fact that Mukul Sangma’s government did not intervene and get the indigenous broom exempted from GST resulted in the anger getting directed at the Congress rather than the Centre. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has since taken a corrective measure, maybe just in time for a clean sweep.
Santwana Bhattacharya
The author is the Political Editor of New Indian Express
Email: santwana.bhattacharya@gmail.com