State of play: Nammalli, Nimmalli... What's it going to be?

You know what they say… Politics is one tenths perception and nine tenths reality.

In the case of S.M. Krishna’s shock embrace of the BJP against the backdrop of the mind-boggling sweep of UP by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, perception is reality - the rats are jumping ship; abandoning the sinking Congress party for Narendra Modi’s upwardly mobile BJP, steered on the inside by the new kid on the block – the silver-tongued, fiery Yogi Adityanath’s, Modi 2.0?

An SMK today. A Srinivasprasad, a Rita Bahuguna Joshi, a Sonowal, a Rane yesterday. A Yogeshwar tomorrow. SMK isn’t alone in his quest to avenge slights, many real, some imagined. He joins all the others that the Congress has parked on the shelf, put out to pasture.

Team Rahul ignores the barbs, the dark mutterings about leadership change at its own peril. Although, in a Congress of the future, tied into what many say will be a grand anti-BJP opposition maha gathbandhan in the making  - and largely irrelevant - will it matter whether it’s led by a Gandhi scion or a Gandhi appointee.

Narada, surely another ‘let’s throw some mud and see how much sticks’ attack on the much loved Didi? It worked beautifully against the UPA. Will it work against a UPA pitted against an incumbent BJP? 

SMK’s anger, long to come to the boil was sparked, when, despite a green signal from the top leadership that he was on course to becoming a Rajya Sabha member, the post went to a younger, little known candidate.

Mr Krishna wasn’t told he was being iced, till the night before the filing of nominations. Enough reason to cut ties? Precedents exist. But there was no BJP in this wild wild West, kicking down every Congress door.

Surely, Team Rahul can see what’s as plain as day– in every state that has gone to the polls across the country thus far, without exception, a disgruntled former Congressman – or Congresswoman - has switched sides: his or her followers have followed their Pied Piper; Come the polls, the state is the BJP’s, ripe for the picking.

How many more is Rahul going to slip out of his fingers? Not that he has many. And what is he doing about it?

Truth be told, even when there is no crossing over or betrayal, and the Congress wins it as they did in Goa, the party’s ability to close the deal is singularly missing. There’s no bite. No hunger. Not even a growl. Just a whimper.

The tigress Indira would have mauled anyone who stood in her way. But that was another era. Under the benign Manmohan Singh-Sonia Gandhi dispensation, everyone from the politician, the bureaucrat, the minister and his flunky, feathered his own nest rather than reinforce the party from the bottom-up. The corrupt did rule. Was the prime minister blind-sided or did he choose not to notice?

In Karnataka, the Congress under Chief Minister Siddaramaiah is in similar danger of being ‘steel flyovered’. The BJP is building a new narrative that it stands for clean governance, trying to paper over the Lingayat icon B.S. Yeddyurappa’s less than clean record and the Bellary mine lords’ questionable methods, by widening its own voter base, beyond the sure-fire Lingayat viote bank and the Brahmins, to include the Vokkaligas of Mysore and Mandya in the south.

The buzz is that come April, the KPCC may have an all new face, a Vokkaliga to counter the BJP’s re-invention of itself from a party of one forward caste to all Hindus, forward, backward, and otherwise.

The Congress cannot hold its own if its Vokkaliga base is cut from under it and the BJP’s formula that consolidates the Hindu vote as well as the aspirational youth vote, eats into its caste formula of OBC-minorities-Dalits-Kurubas.

Does the Congress have it within it to dump its failing ‘appeasement of minorities’ formula and talk up the language of the millennial – jobs, savings, a future?

After all, every move that the UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath makes, seen as cut from PM Modi’s fiery cloth, and talking development walking Hindutva, is being keenly watched. It must, it will have a knock-on effect if Hindutva tops development.

No vote catcher in the districts, SMK’s draw could be the new millennial in Bengaluru, who trashes the city’s descent into chaos and blames the Congress and Siddu for it’s rank mismanagement.

Except, SMK, who had to wait for three whole days before he even met the prime minister is, many say, now having to look beyond another slight - the instructions from Delhi that there would be no grand triumphal march into the city, that all BJP workers who had been tasked and primed to line the streets were asked to stand down, and that the ‘homecoming’ would be a simple affair at the BJP headquarters.

With SMK, still unsure whether he’s a ‘nammalli’ or a ‘nimmalli’, the kingdom of the south has not been won yet.