Battleground Karnataka: How Siddaramaiah Stole the BJP’s Thunder
“The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
— King Lear
BJP President Amit Shah who arrived in Bangalore on 11 August and is currently camping there had nothing but the strictest reprimands for the state unit of his party. To say that the Karnataka BJP is a divided house is to underwhelm the precise extent of this truth. But more on this in detail in the next part of this essay.
What should concern the party which seems blissfully — or wilfully — asleep is the kind of unremitting serial raids that Siddaramaiah continues to inflict upon it. While the BJP top leadership so far seems to have adopted a wait-and-watch mode, Siddaramaiah had already lapsed into election mode about five or six months ago.
Consider how adroitly he has reinvented himself in this timespan. From spearheading the most corrupt and venal regime Karnataka has ever seen, Siddaramaiah today has managed to successfully rebrand himself as a champion of the downtrodden and the poor who deserves to be reelected. In other words, he continues to use the full might of the state machinery to aggressively escalate his mantra of “AHINDA” (Minorities, Backward Castes, and Dalits) which had yielded a significant vote harvest in the past.
One favourable outcome of this rebranding exercise — wholly centred around Siddaramaiah, the leader and the Chief Minister — has been to wipe away the accumulated sins of malgovernance, minorityism, corruption, and crime over the past four years from public memory and perception. Here’s a short checklist of said sins:
- Large scale corruption in, and additional tax burden thanks to his ill-informed, socialist schemes ending with “Bhagya.”
- Policies designed to ensure the flight of capital and investment from the state.
- Extreme appeasement of Muslims to the extent of even letting off Jihadi murderers.
- Rampant political killings most notably of members of the RSS and other allied groups sympathetic to Hindu causes.
- Suspicious deaths and “suicides” of senior civil servants, policemen, and other bureaucratic staff most notably when K.J. George was the Home Minister.
- Targeted attacks against Hindus, their institutions, worship, and traditions.
This is just a partial list, all of which are in the public domain, and because of which he faced severe, statewide ire until recently.
The Politics of Siddaramaiah
When one traces Siddaramaiah’s political journey, it’s clear that he possesses all the traits of an ambitious politician focussed solely on capturing power: unholy compromises, patience, divide-and-conquer, and ruthlessness.
As a young admirer of the late Congress Chief Minister Devaraj Urs, it’s clear that Siddaramaiah has imbibed that same, vile art of divisiveness and anything-goes model of electioneering and administration. It was Devaraj Urs who introduced the precedent of crassness in Karnataka’s polity: any means was fine to capture and retain power. It was he who groomed “Harijan” leaders like Mallikarjun Kharge and Dharam Singh among others.
And it’s this exact same crassness coupled with brazenness that has characterized Siddaramaiah’s tenure as Chief Minister. While becoming an “outsider” Congress Chief Minister was no mean feat, the real uphill task was retaining the post against continual intra-party skulduggeries. However, at the end of three years, Siddaramaiah demonstrated that he had wrested complete control over the party unit and Government.
Siddaramaiah also pragmatically realises that this is his last chance not only of retaining power but relevance itself in a national political atmosphere now almost wholly dominated by the Narendra Modi — Amit Shah-led BJP. With 18 states in its bag, the BJP still appears restless to complete its Grand Indian Political Conquest. And Karnataka is the last large and moneybag state posing a challenge.
A loss would be catastrophic to Siddaramaiah: he has not only burnt bridges permanently with his former mentor Deve Gowda but has amassed powerful enemies within his own party. This lends credence to the words of Congress Vokkaliga strongman D.K. Shiva Kumar’s mother who, in the wake of the recent Income Tax raids, angrily lamented that “Siddaramaiah cut my son’s throat after gaining his trust.” Needless, this implies that the Chief Minister was behind the Income Tax raids.
The Reinvention of Siddaramaiah
If one believes D.K. Shiva Kumar’s mother, it’s also further proof of Project Reinvent Siddaramaiah. Consider how deftly he has made his moves.
- Beginning roughly around April, he cemented his dominance by winning two bypolls in Nanjanagud and Gundlupet with impressive margins thereby “proving” that his former mentor, Srinivasa Prasad and a BJP led by Yeddyurappa were no match for him.
- The continuing advertising blitzkrieg projecting him as both the saviour and undisputed leader of the state. Among others, this blitzkrieg also includes buying enormous amounts of screen time in multiplexes like PVR, Inox, etc showcasing his “achievements.” The ad is ridiculously shoddy but is nevertheless a clever-by-half attempt that shows an urban, jeans-clad “liberated” feminist type woman on a Bullet motorbike touring the interiors of Karnataka: from extremely poor villagers up to the guy in a swanky Mercedes in Bangalore, all are singing liberal praises of The Siddaramaiah.
- Appearing in a two-day segment of the wildly popular celebrity talk show, Weekend with Ramesh. That he appeared right after the segment with Deve Gowda reveals more than a mere coincidence. Perhaps none from the BJP even thought that this sort of thing was a worthwhile political investment.
- Pacifying another prominent Vokkaliga leader, M.H. Ambareesh, the erstwhile Housing Minister who had been sulking after being dumped in a reshuffle.
- Deepening and widening his AHINDA brand of social engineering in the form of vertically splitting the Lingayat vote base by directly luring the influential Matha-heads who command enormous following in North Karnataka.
- More significantly — like say in Punjab — he has indirectly shown that he’s capable and confident of winning the polls without any assistance from the toothless tiger known as the Congress High Command.
One can expect such similar moves aimed at both consolidating his clout and demoralizing the BJP in the coming months all the way up to poll time. What also characterises these efforts at rebranding is a form of brazen aggression whose underlying tune is this: I’ll spin my message however I deem fit, I’ll whitewash my Government’s failures and do whatever it takes to win.
If you are the superstitious type, recall that it was Chickmagalur in Karnataka that heralded the resurgence of Mrs. Gandhi who was at her lowest ebb in 1978.
The BJP simply has no state leader who can effectively counter this let alone scripting its own independent narrative. But because this is an election year, some latitude can be given to the BJP’s failure to counteract a Siddaramaiah in election mode. Indeed, if snap polls were held today, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the BJP will only slightly improve its existing tally of 44 assembly seats. But what explains the preceding four years in which the Congress Government handed scandal after scandal to it on a platter? Was it complicity, cowardice or both?
These questions will be examined in the next part of this essay.
