It’s happening! The revolving door is here. And post the February vote-on-account budget, when the trio of parties sit down and decide on tickets, will be when all doors will slam shut. Right now, even though polls haven’t been announced yet, you can see how politicians of all hues are looking at the main chance, ready to jump ship, blithely offering to shed old colours for new, looking at which party they can nail their flagging fortunes to.
Rumours are flying thick and fast. Five prominent Congressmen will join the BJP in February. Who? The JD(S) will lose its Zameer Ahmed and its Mandya game-changers by January. The BJP bastion in Ballari? Anand Singh makes common cause with the Congress. A prominent former JD(S) MLA turned BJP man will quit and join the Congress.
In these uncertain, politically fluid times, if there’s one thing the Congress under seasoned campaigner Siddaramaiah and the BJP under the oh so sharp Amit Shah know, its this – there’s little point in rolling out the red carpet for these men and women unless they can guarantee their seats and the ones that abut them.
The buzz in political circles was that a senior minister in the Siddaramaiah cabinet, was told just that when he approached the BJP a few weeks ago, by none other than the human electoral calculator aka Amit Shah who weighed the pros and cons and gave him a thumbs down. The cruel reality? Would he able to retain his own seat let alone withstand the BJP hurricane that was coming.
Either way, everyone’s knocking on everyone’s door. It began, months ago, of course with the Congress eminence grise, S.M..Krishna, and for reasons that will always be mystifying, choosing to end years of elbow grease with one party to take up a not so eminent position in another. The Bengaluru we are today – minus the mess and the manner in which we have earned our latest, not so flattering sobriquet, the ‘city of exploding lakes’ – the city we can be, is courtesy, the far-sighted Mr Krishna and for that, he will always have our respect; whether in or out of office.
While his electoral chops in the Vokkaliga stronghold of Mandya and Hale Mysuru may not be what they once were, and delivering Karnataka as other Congressmen who switched sides in other Congress ruled states as in Sonowal and Assam, not as easy, he could be the one the BJP picks to spearhead the campaign to woo our cities – Bengaluru, Mysuru, Mangaluru, Hubli, Belagavi – where rapid urbanization has brought a similarity of challenges, and where some 60-80 seats could be the game-changer, bringing in the shifting voter, the swing vote that can make all the difference. It could be exactly what the BJP needs in a state that still votes rigidly on caste lines.
But the bigger problem are these leaky ships. There’s C.P.Yogeshwar, of course, who’s never been anything but a migratory bird, deeply uncomfortable at being made to play second fiddle to Chennapatna-Bangalore Rural strongman D.K.Shivakumar and his brother D.K.Suresh. By quitting the Congress and joining the BJP, he’s declared war on not just the DK brothers, he’s also signaled the end of Anita Kumaraswamy’s run as the face of her father-in-law, the last of the Vokkaliga giants, in this Vokkaliga pocket. The BJP is already salivating at the thought. The on-again off- again BJP-JD(S) backroom deal and all the pre-poll posturing on going it alone, always fascinating.
Here’s the thing. H.D.Deve Gowda maybe supreme in Hassan, but that leaked Congress survey which predicted 64 seats is bogus. Nobody – even 14 weeks away from polls – is willing to give the Janata Dal(S) any more seats than they have already. Raichur’s Manappa Vajal and Shankarlinge Gowda switching to the BJP can only cut that number down further.
It was of course the picture of the Ballari strongman and Sreeramulu understudy, Anand Singh in Congress leader Santosh Lad’s car that set off this train of thought. Singh is probably not going to openly join the Congress. He will probably run as an independent with the Congress putting up a dummy candidate.
The Chief Minister, whose every move is being watched closely by the B.S.Yeddyurappa camp, smarting at the repeated ‘you were jailed for corruption’ jibe, cannot afford to give the Congress tag to a man who was jailed in the Janardhan Reddy mining scandal in Ballari that tarred the BJP’s reputation with its singularly inappropriate Operation Lotus. Corruption. With anti-incumbency a factor, this is the only card Mr Siddaramaiah has against the BJP. Turning the tables on the JD(S) accusation of Congress skimming the profits from the Sandur mines by handing the probe over to the CBI was pure genius. A heightened sense of self-preservation kicking in!
The caste calculus, one is told was going to be THE formula. But despite the chief minister’s best efforts to woo the BJP-leaning Lingayats – a fraction would have been enough to boost the Congress’ fortunes – and use the state flag and the language, the sub-nationalistic tenor hasn’t quite had the resonance that he had banked on. The budget will probably see him raining goodies on the populace, and give a fillip to the farmers who have given Karnataka the dubious distinction of having the second highest farmer suicides in the country.
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi not only tapped into the agrarian distress in Gujarat to win seats in the hinterland that the Congress had not won in over 15 years, he also fed into Dalit, Patidar and OBC anger against the incumbent BJP. Here in Karnataka, it’s the reverse. The very same cards that Congress used to attack the BJP will be used against them. Unlike Gujarat, though, this is a state that marches to a vastly different drummer.
