Should one thank the BJP or the Congress for putting on the most rivetting spectacle that one has ever seen in the history of Karnataka! This last week has been a roller coaster, a whirlwind, a maelstrom. And in the middle of it all was the BJP’s once sure-footed B.S. Yeddyurappa, who thought – mistakenly - that now that his job of winning his own seat was done and he had brought the BJP up from an abysmal 40 to a remarkable 104, his job was done. He was chief minister again! He must be wondering what kind of a quicksand he’s been led into.
This isn’t 2006. It isn’t even 2008. Back then, he had a free hand. Without anybody breathing down his neck, a law unto himself, BSY had in a smooth behind the scenes op. pulled off a shockingly successful Operation Kamala, powered by the Reddy billions... a world away from the BJP of the Vajpayee and Advani eras, his fate in the hands of the largely benign BJP pointman in this state, Arun Jaitley, who like every other BJP power centre in Delhi, Sushma Swaraj included, didn’t bat an eyelid when the BJP went from 110 to 118. Ours not to question why!
The dead giveaway on how much the BJP has taken on a completely new avatar came with the eye-popping spectacle of Prime Minister Narendra Modi striding into the spanking new BJP headquarters alongside his Chanakya, Mr Amit Shah and proclaiming victory from the ramparts as the emperors of old did from the Red Fort.
Victory? Really? With only 104 seats in the bag? Is there more to this strategy that we couldn’t see? Was BSY led up the garden path and then sacrificed at the altar of convenience?
Either way, even before the election results had been certified by the Election Commission, B.S. Yeddyurappa was instructed to race to Raj Bhavan and stake claim to form the government. Then came Governor Rudabhai Vajubhai Vala, the third trine in the BJP’s Modi-Shah-Vala trinity, inviting the leader of the single largest party, the BJP, to form the government. Clearly, they were expecting the Congress to be as supine as they were when the Goa, Manipur and Mizoram results came in.
The last thing anyone expected was for the Congress to take the bit between its teeth, swallow its bile and forge a Pax Karnataka with the father-son duo on whom the party had rained invective. But this is why the Congress of 2018 - like the BJP - may be an equally new reincarnation. This isn’t the Congress of the politically correct Sonia Gandhi who had an attack of conscience – or was it nerves - after she led the Congress to victory in 2004 and then appointed Dr Manmohan Singh as prime minister, instead of taking what was rightfully hers.
This is a scrappy, feisty, argumentative Congress which has no intention of taking the politically correct route. Throwing political niceties to the wind, they’ve shown a willingness to fight their corner, sparing no-one, a far cry from the Congress of elections past.
The phone call that Sonia Gandhi made to H.D.Deve Gowda and that Rahul Gandhi made to Janata Dal(S) leader H.D.Kumaraswamy ended the rift between the two parties. It didn’t stop HDK from taking BJP leader Prakash Javdekar’s call either. The key difference was that while the two Congress leaders said they would back HDK for chief minister, the BJP made a huge error of judgement in offering – to make, not HDK, but his brother H.D.Revanna the deputy chief minister, while offering to “rehabilitate” HDK in Delhi! That word is said to have made HDK see red!
All in all, it was a mystifying offer. The Chief Minister of the BJP led government, supported by the JD(S) would be B.S Yeddyurappa? Deliberate? Surely Amit Shah knew of the bad blood between BSY and HDK!
Did the Congress read it better? Last Saturday as the exit polls came streaming across our television screens it was obvious to everyone that the Congress had been dealt a body blow, that they had lost all of old Mysore and the rank stupidity of calling the JD(S) the “B” team of the BJP to draw the Muslim votes their way, ended up not only splitting the Muslim vote between the JD(S) and the Congress, but gave the BJP a clear run in parts of the state where, hitherto, it had little or no following. The Lingayats had stayed with the BJP. The Vokkaliga anger singed the Congress. Only the Kurubas, and there were simply not enough of them, voted for the irascible Congress chief Siddaramaiah, ploughing a very lonely furrow.
When Karnataka in charge KC Venugopal hotfooted it to Delhi to brief the Congress chief Rahul Gandhi in Delhi on the whys and wherefores of the poll as the votes came in that Saturday, two of the Congress’canny old campaigners were brought in for the confab the next morning, one of whom had given the BJP a run for its money in Gujarat. Either way, Ashok Gehlot and Ghulam Nabi Azad were in Bengaluru that night, in the full knowledge that their legislators would be wooed by the Janardhan Reddy-Sriramulu cash offensive. Who would have the moxy to say no!
The midnight court drama – Salaam Judges!! - that followed over the next 48 hours, the stream of stories about the ‘abduction’ of Anand Singh and the Maski legislator, the telephone tapes of Congress and JD(S) MLAs – and their relatives - being offered cash and other inducements, the bus journeys...
Surely the BJP top guns knew none of this could be done on the sly.
This Saturday, as BSY gave his emotional ‘I won but I want to stand for the right things...If we had got 113 seats, the picture would have been extremely different,” speech before he ended the shortest tenure in chief ministerial history, 55 hours in offfice, in tears, the one thing that troubled me was this - was it at all possible that B.S. Yeddyurappa was the victim of a grand BJP conspiracy that deliberately sacrificed him so that he could be painted as a victim, and a martyr in 2019, leading Congress into a well-laid trap?
True, he isn’t particularly popular in BJP’s Delhi circles, let alone among the BJP’s Lingayat leaders, and even less so, his associates.
But come 2019, he could be presented to the Lingayat community as the man that the Congress had prevented from becoming CM, so that even the fraction of Lingayat voters that the Congress counted on, would come back to the BJP and help them win the 28 seats that PM Modi needs from this southern state?
The Congress-JD(S) alliance may have seen old rivalries being put aside to keep Karnataka BJP-mukt. But will it last? The Mamata Banerjees and Mayawatis, the KCR and Chandrababu Naidus of this world, are determined to be the glue and the gum to see that they win all the bypolls that are coming, so that the coalition ups its numbers.
So, for everyone who thought this was about Karnataka 2018, it isn’t. It’s about Karnataka 2019 and the 28 seats, the southern state that didn’t go saffron, sends to the Lok Sabha…
