Stress? A migraine? Or just weighed down by the irrefutable certainty, that after Tuesday, Argentina’s star No 10 could be watching the World Cup from outside Russia… Lionel ‘Leo’ Messi repeatedly rubbing his forehead, loping off, forlorn, alone. It felt like the Argentinian knew he had failed. Not just Argentina but every one of his fans. Handing out advice is easy, but this must be said - ‘if he didn’t let success go to his head, he musn’t let failure get to his heart…’ And it applies to Messis everywhere. It takes a big man to admit he's fumbled and lost, and while the parable may be a stretch but that’s exactly the mess that our motley crew of conflicted Congressmen in the state find themselves in. Our forward, Siddaramaiah and his main strikers M.B.Patil and Satish Jarkiholi and the rest of the malcontents, who scored one self goal after another - from the Lingayats will abandon the BJP and vote for the Congress to the JD(S) being a B team of the BJP - are hunkering down for the next round in 2019. That’s not going to be about winning alone but to settle scores, and again, not just with the opposition BJP and this unlikeliest of coalition partners, the Janata Dal (S) with whom Siddaramaiah’s relations are let's say, prickly, but with rivals in their own party, the Congress. Except, it's not settling scores they should be looking at, but at rebirth, at redemption, at a new avatar, at moving on.
Because that’s what this one man - whose yoga poses had more likes than Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s did on International Yoga Day, a Modi brainchild – has done. Former prime minister Hardanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda is a genius. Or just plain lucky! Long on patience and strategy, he’s waited for the stars to align in his favour, for a return to the time when with a handful of MPs - 16 in all - he found himself ensconced at Race Course Road. This is the man, Mr Sanjaya Baru, who fits the tag of Accidental Prime Minister, more than Manmohan Singh ever will. With a team of astrologers to advise him, one hears that they predict a rise to the very top - he, and with him, his sons and grandsons and of course, his ambitious daughters-in-law! Watch out Narendra Modi! The Gowda you lavished with fulsome praise when you met the son, is coming for you! The permutations could be many – the mentally and physically agile Mr Deve Gowda who spent an entire evening telling one bunch of visitors how he had pulled the coalition of the opposition, 20 disparate leaders who compete for space in their own respective states, together for his son’s H D Kumaraswamy’s second coming - and his - is aiming once more to be prime minister. He's wangling for 10 of the 28 parliamentary seats. And he’s quietly let it be known, of course, that he’s not walking away from the battle that looms in 2019, and that his launch pad will not be his home ground of Hassan but the prestigious, eponymous heart of Karnataka, Mysuru.
And all too predictably setting the stage for what could be the wedge that is driven through this fragile amity, this is the very same seat that our former chief minister Siddaramaiah has his eye on for his own reboot. Not a great fit? Siddaramaiah’s anti-Wadiyar stance is as well known as his scant disregard for temple rituals and yet, it is this stamp of legitimacy from the seat of minor royalty that he seems to be hankering after. His detox at Dharamsthala has him turning vegetarian, a 180-degree turn from the time he scandalized the religious by announcing his proclivity for meat on one such temple visit! Now, that’s a signal that he’s learnt something from his huge election fail. Fact is, it’s not just caste that is the pull in a Karnataka that still remains deeply conservative – it’s caste and religion and ritual. And frankly, no amount of temple hopping will change Siddaramaiah's back-story. People know when someone’s faking it.
One must wonder whether Siddaramaiah would have been better served if he had done a Deve Gowda and had employed crystal ball gazers of his own, rather than the self-serving crew who failed to tell him the truth. The Emperor and his clothes... No amount of bhagyas can win you the election unless you are an Amma, who empowers the women voter by giving her everything she has dreamed of - a house, independence, education and the moolah and goodies to make it happen. An Indira canteen? Really! It caters to the urban poor, not the mass vote you need to power you to the Soudha. Siddaramaiah, who surrounded himself with yes-men who only told him what he wanted to hear unfortunately sold the same pup to the Congress biggies, who despite being warned by many, that one Siddaramaiah does not a Congress make, put their faith in this one man and one man alone. A tactical error of gargantuan proportions. One tour of the backstreets of pollbound Mandya, Mysuru and Chamundeswari and you could taste the hate, from the coconut water seller raring to settle scores to seasoned politicians who had served the Congress well, and left wondering why they had been left by the wayside while men with deep pockets but no real political connect had been given tickets.
Truth be told, parties like the Congress don’t hear the bad news till it is too late to retrieve the situation. If there’s one thing the BJP does and does well, it is listen to its foot-soldiers. It has its ears to the ground. Kathua and the growing Hindu backlash in Jammu putting paid to the BJP's Kashmir four-year experiment, being just one example. There will be others as polls come ever closer. Long before the Karnataka polls, the BJP president Amit Shah had figured out that the BJP’s state leaders couldn’t cut it and that not only should they be phased out but they needed a leg-up from a Modi, who in his heyday could spin any audience around. But as we found, even that didn’t work, the empty seats and the lukewarm response a telling wake-up call that speeches, even great speeches, only go this far. While Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy and his deputy chief minister Dr.G.Paramewshwar –subsuming their differences and sidestepping the state’s power elites to make the Deve-Gowda-Rahul Gandhi deal work – focus, at long last on rebuilding Bengaluru – one hopes that Karnataka finally has a government, however messy, however contrarian, however long it lasts, that works. Life. So very, very Messi!!