The Splendid Isolation of Siddaramaiah
You really need to hand it to the man. Narendra Modi has again proved that he’s really the unbeatable Master of Timing with his just-concluded campaign speech in Santemaranahalli in poll-bound Karnataka. And this is just the first of his upcoming blitzkriegs across the state.
If the past is any indicator, Narendra Modi’s artillery, as expected, has bombed the best-laid plans of a Congress party desperately sputtering for breath in the last significant state in its kitty.
A big part of timing in politics lies in mastering the virtue of silence. Like in innumerable other instances, Narendra Modi has forced the Congress to reveal its cards — for whatever they’re worth — over a period of about a year. And by sounding the bugle today, he only promises to bring down the house of cards called the Congress party. This sense of timing plays a major role in altering the narrative and indeed, changes the entire course of elections. Perhaps only one other politician had mastered this virtue: P V Narasimha Rao.
There’s every reason to believe that it was precisely anticipating this outcome that Siddaramaiah repeatedly attempted to display bravado that “I’m not scared of Modi, Yogi, and Amit Shah,” and variants thereof. In plain language, he was merely attempting to hide his misgivings of his party’s campaign imploding once the Prime Minister set foot in the state.
A Campaign of Desperation
In reality, the Congress party’s Karnataka campaign is a smokescreen of anguish, desperation, and despair. For all practical purposes, it’s a non-campaign. It’s a headless chicken with numerous in-house, hungry butchers plotting to chop it off bit by bit.
In his classic Parva, Dr. S L Bhyrappa gives a memorable insight by creating a brilliant scene on the eve of the climactic Kurukshetra war. On the side of the Kauravas, no one is genuinely interested in the war except Duryodhana. It is entirely Duryodhana’s war because he created the conditions that eventually led up to it.
In the context of the Karnataka 2018 assembly polls, replace “Duryodhana” with “Siddaramaiah.”
Arguably, there’s a case to be made for the reason Rahul Gandhi has near-totally outsourced the Congress campaign to Siddaramaiah. An obvious reason owes to the fact that he has provided the source of funding and retained his hold on the Congress party’s last big state.
But there’s a deeper reason. At the heart of this reason is a subterranean uninterestedness on the part of other powerful Karnataka Congress leaders to lead the campaign from the front. How many of these veteran Congress leaders are actually putting up a spirited fight even now, even at this ultimate leg of the campaign? Almost none. And those leaders who are actively campaigning fall in exactly one bucket: those who owe their political careers to Siddaramaiah; needless, their clout and influence is severely limited.
Two eminent and well-known pointers will serve to illustrate the reality of Siddaramaiah’s non-campaign.
The first is obviously Siddaramaiah’s choice of Badami as a second constituency from where he is contesting. Of course, “people wanted me to contest from Badami” is the oldest ruse of a politician since the time Julius Caesar assented to wear the crown because his “beloved Romans wanted” him to. The obvious real reason is the fact that he faces certain defeat in his home turf, Chamundeshwari. But by contesting from Badami as well, he has unwittingly exposed a new flank of vulnerability and made a determined opposition convert it into an issue of prestige. And if this combined opposition plays its cards well, Siddaramaiah stares at twin electoral humiliation.
The second pointer is the now-viral video of an unknown Janata Dal (S) worker, Mariswamy who publicly booed the Chief Minister in his own constituency. The fact that Siddaramaiah invited this humiliation upon himself is doubly humiliating. No other Karnataka Congress leader, no matter how unpopular he or she is, has faced this frontal drubbing — ever in the electoral history of this state.
This is the reality of the Congress party and its campaign in Karnataka no matter how hard its B-team in the media works overtime to whitewash it.
An Unlikely Chief Minister
The roots of this pathetic fate lie in the leadership style of Siddaramaiah since he took over as Chief Minister in 2013. This leadership style can be couched in two words: hubris and insecurity.
When we look at history dispassionately, Siddaramaiah was and remains an unlikely Chief Minister. After his short-lived second stint as Deputy Chief Minister in the Dharam Singh Government, nobody considered him a prospective Chief Minister material. Although his AHINDA rally in 2005 re-established him as a heavyweight, a shot at the top job was still far away, unlikely even.
But it was in 2013 that he shrewdly sensed a rapidly-altering political reality across the nation. Like numerous Congress leaders, he knew that the party’s fortunes were on an irreversible decline nationally. And the fact that the Karnataka Congress was a den of petty squabblers without a unifying figure to rally around. It was then that he sought and obtained his pound of flesh: the Chief Minister’s chair.
While he obtained the coveted chair, the Congress still remained the same den of petty squabblers. And it is to stem this, to insulate his seat that he began to piss off the “original” Congressmen from Day One.
And as must happen, the chickens have today come home to roost. Indeed, if a Congress-friendly paper like Deccan Herald has to say the following, it reveals the enormity of what Siddaramaiah currently faces:
A Vokkaliga outfit in Mysuru has publicly announced that it will not support Siddaramaiah in the polls…When H D Kumaraswamy was chief minister for 20 months, his secretariat had 90% OBC and minorities and the rest were Vokkaligas. In Siddaramaiah’s secretariat, 90% officials are his own.
This pissing-off actually predated his Chief Ministership. One only needs to recall how Siddaramaiah succeeded in a deliberate, concerted effort to defeat the Tumkur strongman, Parameshwar, a formidable rival to his Chief Ministerial ambition. Not to mention how he kept the influential Vokkaliga leader, D K Shiva Kumar out of his cabinet for nearly two years.
This list of sidelining lifelong Congressmen only grew over the next three years: the infamous cabinet reshuffle which witnessed the axing of heavyweights like Ambareesh, Qamarul Islam, Shamanoor Shivashankarappa, Baburao Chinchansoor, Dinesh Gundu Rao, Kimmane Ratnakar, and his one-time mentor, Srinivasa Prasad. On the other side, Siddaramaiah also effectively rendered a powerful Dalit leader like Mallikarjun Kharge voiceless in Karnataka.
It would be sheer naiveté to assume that these heavyweights will forget their five-year-long humiliation in a hurry.
JD(S) Old Boys Club
Between 2013–18, Siddaramaiah effectively transformed the Karnataka Congress party into a JD(S) Old Boys Club — the same JD(S) members who he had wooed into Congress from the parent party. If this wasn’t enough, let’s look at something else that the aforementioned Deccan Herald report says:
One of the first things Siddaramaiah did after becoming chief minister was to remove Deve Gowda’s portrait from Vidhana Soudha.
This action is on par with the despicable manner in which Sonia Gandhi treated the dead body of P V Narasimha Rao. It’s ingratitude bordering on savagery. The undeniable truth is that Siddaramaiah owes a major portion of his political growth and stardom to former Prime Minister Deve Gowda’s grooming. And those who’ve followed Deve Gowda’s six decades of political life know that vendetta is a key ingredient of his politics. Enough said.
With the command that the JD(S) still retains in the Old Mysore belt, it will be unsurprising to watch the spectacle of the Congress getting wiped out there after May 15, 2018. The Mariswamy episode is just the precursor to this electoral annihiliation.
On its part, the BJP has a Narendra Modi and a Yogi Adityanath in its arsenal apart from a massive consolidation that has occurred in the Malnad, Coastal and vast swathes of North Karnataka region.
Siddaramaiah stands in splendid isolation.
Postscript: The certain defeat of the Congress party in Karnataka implies that Siddaramaiah is merely writing the preface to its epitaph in the 2019 General Elections.
