
In the last two decades, the Karnataka unit of the BJP has consistently delivered seats and vote share in both assembly and parliamentary polls. After the assembly polls of 2008, when they nearly equalled the Congress vote share in the state, they have never really slipped.
The state unit’s Lok Sabha performance in 2024, with 17 seats out of 28, had ensured that Narendra Modi’s position in New Delhi was not in peril. Its delivery of 25 seats in 2019 was extraordinary. What was till recently perceived to be a rather robust unit—one of its kind in southern India—has suddenly sunk into a crisis.
The state BJP’s caste base, public confidence and leadership quality has seen enormous flux in recent months. But it remains a mystery why the BJP high command has allowed this drift that is being spoken about loudly. One is not sure if they are allowing a short-term combustion in the party unit to introduce long-term changes. Or, is it disinterest in a unit that has behaved more or less autonomously, and has been wrapped in complexity for its northern Indian handlers?
Some would argue that the decline in the local unit started in 2021 after B S Yediyurappa stepped down as chief minister, and Basavaraj Bommai was allowed a certain administrative wilfulness. Others would insist that the dissonance began after Yediyurappa’s son, B Y Vijayendra, took over as state president, which gathered momentum after the Lok Sabha elections. The dissidents, it is said, had held their fire until Modi was ensconced in Delhi. That was their clever way of signalling that their anger was against the local leadership, not against the central leadership or the party at large.
No past leader appointed by the central leadership, much less a president, has been subjected to such bitter treatment as Vijayendra has been accorded. The humiliation and abuse heaped on him have had a quotidian frequency, and his chief tormentor has been Basangouda Patil Yatnal, a state legislator and former Union minister. Yatnal has an unblemished record as a loose cannon, and has tried to pestilentially position himself as an ‘uncompromising’ Hindutva ideologue and ‘outspoken’ party loyalist.
Yatnal’s ceaseless diatribes and innuendoes against Vijayendra, his father and their ilk is about an alleged cosy game of compromise they play with Karnataka’s Congress leaders to protect their private interests and political turfs. He has attempted to paint Vijayendra as part of the BJP’s old establishment that prioritises its self-interest.
The bitter implication of Yatnal speaking out frequently is that it has played up the disunity within the party’s Lingayat base, which has till now chiefly contributed to its success. Yatnal hails from the largest sub-sect among the Lingayats, which has fought in recent years for larger political representation. So, his fight has been about grabbing the leadership of the community as well as the state BJP from the Yediyurappa family.
Furthering this intent, Yatnal has made it known that he wants to contest against Vijayendra in the election to be announced soon for the state presidency. If a poll that was meant to be a formality indeed sees a contest, it will be a direct challenge to not just the authority of the Yediyurappa family, but also to the central leadership that picked Vijayendra.
In politics, it is another matter that one who twists the knife may never get to wear the crown. But Yatnal’s words and actions would have helped dismantle a certain old guard in the state party. This possibility begs the question if the BJP high command’s disinterest in taking action against Yatnal, despite his provocations, is about recognising the latent utility of his actions in making way for fresh faces in the state unit at an appropriate time. We have seen this happen in other BJP-dominant states such as Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Goa and Odisha, where the old BJP establishment was replaced with new leadership at an appropriate time; there, too, it had been worked out amid chaos created by the established players.
In Karnataka, there is not just the Yediyurappa family that is an old player; former chief ministers Sadananda Gowda, Jagadish Shettar and Basavaraj Bommai, too, have entrenched interests. They play a manipulative game without any real mass influence. Besides them, B S Sriramulu, C T Ravi, Ramesh Jarkiholi, Kumar Bangarappa, Annasaheb Jolle, Arvind Limbavali and G M Siddeshwara, all of them senior leaders representing a cross-section of communities, have turned against Vijayendra. They seem to have a tactical understanding with Yatnal.
It is also said that Yatnal has enjoyed immunity so far not because he is demanding justice, but is backed by B L Santhosh, BJP’s national organising secretary, who has never kept his political ambition a secret. Hence, if Yatnal challenges Vijayendra with direct or indirect support from these people, it is only about splintering the old establishment that has held the party in its grips for the last 25 years. This makes it easy for the BJP high command to seek fresh changes in the party before Karnataka goes to the polls again in 2028.
When Vijayendra was installed as state president in November 2023, it was thought he would command the same influence and legitimacy as his father, but that goodwill and respect has not been transferred. He has increasingly come across as a factional leader, with his faction being made up of minions whose voices do not really count. This has hampered the agenda of putting the Congress-led state government in the dock despite its deep troubles on many fronts—the dire condition of the state’s finances, the absence of any substantial infrastructure plans, the chief minister’s name getting muddied in a land scam, and the unabashed jockeying for power at the Congress top rung.
The fact that a dynastic transfer within the BJP has not worked smoothly is an element the high command may relish and underline when it effects the changes. In the near future, the party may want to expand its base and escape its exclusive Lingayat branding to achieve a pan-caste and pan-class identity. This may demand the reordering or ejection of its old guard.
(Views are personal)
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior journalist and author of Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi
(Sugata@sugataraju.com)