State of play: The old Jaffer, sometimes Sharief, sometimes Mir

With friends like these…. In one fell swoop, Janata Dal (S) supremo H.D. Deve Gowda has ripped off the façade that feisty Congress old-timer Jaffer Sharief has kept up over the years — albeit with some difficulty — of a Congressman who has remained committed to the party.

There isn’t enough glue in all of Arabia to put that mask back together! Not since he became Indira Gandhi’s trusted informer when he tipped her off about S. Nijalingappa and the other old Congressmen planning to split the party, has Jaffer Sharief been seen as anything other than a trusted loyalist. Sharief, the story goes, the driver who overheard it all, was the insider who became Mrs G’s eyes and ears!

Okay, okay, yes, yes, it’s not that the mask didn’t slip after Mrs G’s passing. Jaffer, in his wisdom, made some very unwise remarks on the suitability or otherwise of the nationality of the bahu who took over the reins post-Rajiv, and quickly found he was no longer the man for all seasons. He hasn’t been fielded as a candidate since. And it’s an open secret that he’s been cavorting with the enemy.

Deve Gowda made much the same noises this Freaky Friday as he had two years ago about Jaffer’s grandson being fielded as a JD(S) candidate and the ‘B’ form that he supposedly collected on his grandson’s behalf. And while many are now saying that the JD(S) chief only outed Jaffer Sharief because he wants the Congress biggies to know Sharief isn’t the man they believe him to be, was he, perchance, egged on by his old protégé to remind Delhi of what it had chosen to forget?

Regular reports — deliberate or otherwise of Sharief senior meeting Gowda senior or talking to Zameer Khan, Sharief’s alleged sympathetic insider in the JD(S) — were clearly meant by this canny Congressman — to convey to the Congress that their Muslim votes would be in jeopardy if they didn’t give his nominee a ticket.

The Congress buckled in 2014. Boy, they’ve buckled again! And how! The curious thing is that the youthful Rahaman, lost by 5,000 odd votes in the last polls. What makes them believe he can close the gap this time is the question; Which brings me to the central point of the Great Jaffer Conspiracy. Was the seat given to the baby faced Rahaman in the full knowledge that in the short-term, he and the Congress would lose, but in losing this one battle, they would achieve their long term goal war of putting the Siddu genie back into the bottle? Wings clipped!

The ruling Congress already has 123 seats, including the Speaker. Win or lose, its majority isn’t at stake here. And, as much as it isn’t a seat that they can realistically expect to win, given that nobody even knows who the new boy in town aka Rahaman is, winning it (Byrathi winning it) would have boosted the CM’s reputation, and not the party’s. Far-fetched? Fact is, there’s no getting away from the fact that it would be the icing on Mr Siddaramaiah’s cake as it would bring his friend and fellow Kuruba into his cabinet. And this, precisely this, of giving the Chief Minister a free run to appoint as many of his cohorts and former JDSites to positions of influence, may have been what the bigwigs wanted to stop at all costs.

Have the old Congressmen — Mallikarjun Kharge whose star is on the rise with his stellar run as opposition leader in parliament, S.M. Krishna whose counsel is still heeded in the party and the others — buried their differences and collectively decided that they cannot let the party be hijacked by a JD(S) parvenu? At least, that’s the buzz on the grapevine… In fact, the scramble for the seat that Byrathi Suresh would have vacated as an independent — if he had been picked for Hebbal — was far more fraught than the nomination for Hebbal, which everyone here believed was a given.

Sharief’s grandson’s name wasn’t even on the sheet of paper that was handed over by state in charge Digvijay Singh to those who matter. There was just one name — Byrathi Suresh’s. I am not saying that the Chief Minister’s pick would have won the Hebbal seat hands down if he had been fielded. It may have been an uphill battle, with many a Byrathi sweetener.  Hebbal’s caste and religious configuration is such that the minority Muslim vote is dominant with some 65,000 votes, the Vokkaliga-Gowdas coming in second at 55,000 and the Kurubas at around 10,000. But Jaffer’s grandson didn’t get the consolidated Muslim vote the last time, did he?

The question then is this — instead of Jaffer Sharief’s grandson, would it have been more prudent to ignore Jaffer’s plea and pick an equally personable young Muslim face? Someone like Rizwan Arshad? (A rather big bird tells me that Rizwan openly blamed Sharief senior for the loss of the Bengaluru Central seat, while other prominent Muslim leaders like Roshan Baig and Rahman Khan and Haris’ constant refrain is that it’s their time now and that the Sharief old-timer should make way for the new.)

The Congress’ minority politics is as much of a given as the BJP’s majoritarian Hindu politics. Dadri, Malda, notwithstanding, (is it Kerala’s turn next?) the Congress high command dismissal of the recommendations of state in charge Digvijay Singh is clearly in keeping with this thinking. One way or the other, the battle for Hebbal presages a bigger battle, for the heart and soul of the Congress in Karnataka, its last holdout in the south, where the old guard is fighting with its back to the wall.