NEW DELHI: Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh believes that if his party wins the Karnataka elections, it would necessarily have an edge in the upcoming assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan later this year and the general elections of 2019.
“Commentators are reading far too much in the Karnataka polls due to the high-pitched campaigns by PM Modi and Rahul Gandhi. I am not going to say if we win in Karnataka, we are going to sweep north India Chattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and 2019 becomes easy,” Ramesh told The New Indian Express.
“This election is not about Modi or Rahul but about Yeddyurappa or Siddaramaiah,” he said referring to the incumbent chief minister and the BJP nominee for the high office. Over the past few weeks, as both Congress chief Rahul Gandhi and Prime Minister Narendra Modi aggressively to woo voters in the southern state, many observers in Delhi linked the assembly polls to the next Lok Sabha polls.
Ramesh, arguing that the voters in Karnataka were sophisticated and discerning enough to differentiate between national and state polls, cited the example of 1984 when the grand old party under former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi won 27 of the 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state but Janata Party leader Ram Krishna Hegde won a thumping majority in the 1985 assembly polls just four months later. Ramesh, a Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka, acknowledged the Congress was fighting a tough political battle in Karnataka but expressed confidence that his party would retain power.
“It is not easy. Two strong national parties Congress and BJP and a strong regional party JD-S are contesting. But I am confident we will cross the arithmetical majority of 113,” he said. The Congress, claimed Ramesh, would win because of chief minister Siddaramaiah’s appeal, strong party organisation and extensive campaigning by Rahul Gandhi. “Siddaramaiah is the last of the strongest local leader with a mass following. We have a narrative of what his government did in the past five years,” he said, “he did not become a mass leader after becoming chief minister, unlike Modi.” Taking a dig at Yeddyurappa, Ramesh said that projecting him as BJP chief ministerial face was in fact helping the Congress. “Yeddyurappa is an important Lingayat leader but he does not command much respect as his tenure as chief minister was marked by corruption charges.
The infamous Bellary brothers (Reddys) are again visible along with him. Projecting Yeddyurappa as the BJP chief minister was a strategic advantage to the Congress,” he said. The Congress strategist supported Siddaramaiah’s political gamble of recognising the Lingayat community as a religious minority, which the BJP has said could backfire.
“The demand has been pending for long. The state government followed the due process in setting up a panel to look into it but since it was submitted to the centre came just before the polls, there is a perception that it was a hasty move,” he said, adding that while Rahul shared stage with Siddaramaiah, Modi completely overshadowed Yeddyurappa.