Once confined to a few pockets across the state, the rise of the BJP in Karnataka, the only Southern Indian State to have provided the saffron party with a solid base, is simple and complex at once.
Simply put, the BJP grew by occupying the vacuum created by the gradual disintegration of the erstwhile Janata Dal. What makes it complex however is the journey the BJP undertook, to become an alternative to the Janata Dal. This growth has been anything but linear but the results are there for all to see. A party which was once confined to a few pockets till a decade and a half ago has brought the entire state under the saffron spell.
As a centrist national-level political force, the Janata Dal was once the only alternative to the Congress in the State. Unlike other Southern States, there was no strong regional party that emerged in Karnataka. But in the 1990s, when the Janata Dal finally disintegrated, the BJP moved up one spot, from third place to second.
From this stage, the BJP has grown from strength to strength. It twice held power in the state - first as a coalition partner in 2006, then on its own in 2008. Since 2004, it has kept improving its performance in Lok Sabha elections and nearly swept the 2019 Lok Sabha polls by winning 25 of the 28 seats.
Here’s the complex part. It was not just a replacement of the centrist politics of the Janata Dal with the BJP’s right-wing ideology. The process involved multiple social, political and cultural strategies to stitch together a rainbow coalition of social groups, once the mainstay of the Congress. As the BJP began to grow by taking the support of new groups, it had to traverse some rough patches of ideological conflicts, personality clashes, embarrassing compromises and splits and mergers.
In the process, however, the BJP lost its original character of a cadre-based cohesive political party with unflinching faith in the right-wing ideology. Today’s BJP is an amalgamation of motley groups such as those with an RSS background, deserters from the Janata Dal and the Congress, business tycoons who wanted to try their luck in politics and others who were virtually bought over by the BJP from other parties, under its infamous Operation Kamala.
Founded at the national level in 1980, the BJP remained a marginal player in Karnataka politics for a decade except during a brief period (1983-85) when it backed the minority Janata Party government of Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde. In the 1983 Assembly elections, the BJP unexpectedly won 18 seats. In the two elections that followed (1985 and 1989) it won four and two seats respectively. The next decade (1990s) saw the BJP gaining significance by winning sufficient seats to become the main opposition party in the State Assembly (40 seats in 1994 and 44 in 1999).
By then, the BJP had grown in stature at the national level as well as in other northern States. It formed the coalition Government at the Centre in 1998 and 1999 under the charismatic leadership of A.B. Vajpayee. In Karnataka, however, the party’s base was not growing. But for the relatively better performance in 1998 Lok Sabha polls, neither the Ram Janmabhoomi movement nor the Vajpayee wave helped it spread much in Karnataka. It tried to polarize voters by creating controversies around the Idgah Maidan issue in Hubli and the Bababudangiri Shrine in Chikmagalur but only with limited success.
For a breakthrough, the party needed a change in its social profile, which started just before the 2004 Assembly elections, with the influx of many leaders from the Janata Dal. In 1990, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi unceremoniously dismissed the then Chief Minister Veerendra Patil, a popular Lingayat leader and the community shifted its loyalties to the Janata Dal. Now with the disintegration of the Janata Dal, they threw their weight behind the BJP.
The second boost came many years later, in 2006, when the BJP formed a coalition government with a breakaway faction of the JDS led by H.D. Kumaraswamy on a rotational power-sharing arrangement. But Kumaraswamy withdrew his support when the time came to hand over power, creating a sympathy wave in BJP’s Chief Minister candidate B.S. Yeddyurappa’s favour, a Lingayat.
Meanwhile, the party also assiduously cultivated the right-hand faction of Dalits, the scheduled tribes of Central Karnataka, Bunts and Billavas of Coastal Karnataka, and OBCs across the State by employing a variety of means ranging from sheer indoctrination to the lure of political office.
In 2008, the sympathy wave, combined with the cultivation of these groups, bagged the BJP 110 seats in the Assembly, three short of a simple majority. The BJP formed the first ever Government in Southern India with the help of independents. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won 19 seats, the highest during the pre-Modi era.
But, both in 2008 and 2013, the BJP fell short of a simple majority in the Assembly polls. In 2018, in spite of a strong bid, it fell short of nine seats to reach the majority mark. This was after trying every trick in its book and even after Prime Minister Narendra Modi descended on the scene.
Then what changed for it in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections? Along with the appeal of the national security centred narrative that Modi introduced on the eve of the elections, the BJP unwittingly got its social coalition further strengthened by the decision of the JDS to tie-up with the Congress. This move alienated the Vokkaligas in the Old Mysore region who had stayed away from the BJP so far. The family-centric policies of the JDS did not help their cause as well.
Paired with the Lingayat votes in the North, the anti-Congress Vokkaliga vote in the South further reinforced the BJP. The JDS, which once prevented the BJP from becoming a pan-Karnataka party, was now responsible for the Vokkaliga vote consolidation.
Now, the social coalition of the BJP seems complete and unshakable at least for the time being.