The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) across India is known as a splendid war machine, but one has to only visit poll-bound Karnataka to realise how underprepared the party’s infantry, cavalry and artillery are in the state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, the two electoral commanders of the party, have been to the state twice already, but have still not spelt out their strategy. It appears that the top two are still absorbing the chaos and confusion in the ranks and are calibrating their response.
Amit Shah, who was in Belagavi, on Saturday asked the local BJP leaders and workers to bury their differences by the time he came to the district next. That was a small acknowledgment of what he was seeing, hearing and processing in one district. He will have to perhaps repeat the statement across the state, in each district. In late December, when he visited Mandya district, he had sharply attacked the Janata Dal (Secular)’s top leadership. Although the attack was directed at Dal leaders, it was interpreted more as a message to his own senior party leaders who have apparently maintained a cozy and clandestine electoral arrangement with the Dal.
This is the first election in decades when B S Yediyurappa (BSY) will not be leading the BJP’s poll charge. He has turned 80, and will not be contesting the polls, but he has not announced retirement yet. He has personal stakes in the ensuing battle. In December and early January, there were indications that BSY was sulking; he perhaps felt ignored, but has somewhat cheered up after Modi’s Mangaluru visit on Friday, where he was reportedly treated well.
It is perhaps a wise move of the BJP high command to bestow some importance on BSY, the ageing war horse who still retains confidence of a wide spectrum of the population and party workers. However, the BJP top leadership keeping him on their side need not necessarily mean that they will work on his terms and replicate his old ways—the pure caste game. The top leadership may see this election as a transition towards developing a more universal electoral pitch in the state than a balkanised caste appeal. The ground conditions are conducive for such an effort with almost all big caste groups demanding a hike in quota. By doing so, they have effectively cancelled out each other.
The replacement of BSY by B S Bommai as chief minister in mid-2021 has not worked out well for the saffron party. The listless and charmless Bommai has truncated the party’s appeal in the last 18 months. He has been a weatherman checking the direction of the wind to hedge his political bets rather than act with conviction. As soon as he came to power, he tried out the hard Hindutva card for a season and allowed the Sangh Parivar to shore up its agenda and assets. When it started damaging the brand equity of the state, and when there was a national and international push back, he walked away into a different arena to work towards his ambition.
Bommai, since he replaced BSY, assumed that it was a mandate given to him by the BJP leadership to bring the Lingayat community under his wings, shunning BSY.
Little had he realised that BSY had worked independently at the grassroots for decades and earned his stripes, unlike him with no moorings.
In pursuance of this grand dream, Bommai started appropriating the quota demand of the biggest sub-sect of the Lingayats—Panchamasalis. They wanted to be put under the 2A category of the backward classes. The top leaders of this sub-sect in the BJP, Basanagouda Patil Yatnal and Murugesh Nirani, had turned antipathetic to BSY. Yatnal, who was seen as a protégé of B L Santosh, the BJP national organising secretary, had begun to viciously attack BSY. Nirani had competed to be chief minister when BSY was being replaced. Bommai exploited these divisions.
It was rumoured that Bommai wanted to dramatically announce the new quota category for Panchamasalis during the recently concluded Belagavi session of the legislature. He perhaps thought it would give him a tailwind to lead the party in the assembly polls and also appeasing the community would help him in his constituency, Shiggaon, where they dominated. For some time, there had been questions about his electoral survival in Shiggaon and this had come in handy. The pontiff of the Panchamasali seminary who was leading the quota demand even claimed that Bommai had sworn on his mother to deliver the quota. But this move did not go through. That angered the community.
Besides Bommai, the BJP’s top leadership will have to contend with Scheduled Tribe leader, B S Sriramulu, who commands a sizable vote. He has looked distracted of late. His bosom pal, the infamous miner Janardhana Reddy, has started a new political party. Sriramulu put out a tweet the other day for its membership drive, and once it had registered in the minds of the people, deleted it. He has been unhappy largely because he was ignored for the deputy chief minister’s post.
The BJP state president Nalin Kateel’s term has ended and there is uncertainty over who will replace him. Kateel never made any impact during his tenure and functioned more as a conduit for B L Santosh’s interests. He recently courted controversy when he asked people not to worry about development but to be more invested in communal issues like love jihad. Anyway, the guess is, since the Hindutva card has reached a saturation point, it is likely that Modi and Shah will develop an overarching narrative around development.
Then, there are those who crossed over from the Congress in 2019, like Ramesh Jarkiholi, who have become restless. In the restless category are also senior leaders like K S Eshwarappa, who said he will not attend the assembly until he has been inducted again into the cabinet. He had been dropped after his name appeared in a contractor’s suicide note. The BJP’s state in-charge, Arun Singh, also appears to be clueless about the mood in the state. In a recent interview he said there was no need to counter the deluge of corruption allegations against the Bommai government.
It is this scattered army that Modi and Shah will have to pull together to fight a battle in the next three months. They may not hesitate to push through a drastic war plan.
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior journalist and author