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Polls - Karnataka '08
From The Telegraph, 29 May 2008

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->IN A LAND OF MULTIPLE FISSURES 
<b>What stands out in the Karnataka results is not the defeat of the Congress, but the scale of the BJP’s victory,</b> writes Mahesh Rangarajan


Karnataka has done more than reject the Congress second time running. <b>It has given the Bharatiya Janata Party a chance to run the state on its own for five years. By gaining power in a southern state, the latter has a chance to prove it is a truly national force.</b> In turn, the Congress has to reassess what went wrong.

Social realignments will go a long way in explaining why the baton was passed. B.S. Yeddyurappa, the veteran of many an assembly election is a Lingayat, and he was projected as the future chief minister throughout the entire campaign by his party. There were as many as four Lingayat chief ministers in a row from 1956 to 1972. These included the veteran Congressman S. Nijalingappa, Indira Gandhi’s bête noire during the split of 1969. Eventually, it was the young prime minister who had the last laugh. She picked the young Devaraj Urs as her handyman and he trounced the old guard in the southern state. Karnataka, like Andhra Pradesh, stood like a rock by Indira after the Emergency.

Indira’s magic worked for longer here than the rest of India. The forced sterilizations and the slum demolitions of north India had no counterpart here. In fact, the Seventies were a period when wealth and opportunity spread more evenly. In the coastal areas in particular, land was even redistributed to small holders, and tenants got a measure of protection.

When the Congress did lose power, it was to a minority government headed by the late Ramakrishna Hegde in 1983. Hegde combined suave charm with guile, and though a Brahmin himself, he cultivated the Lingayats and was accepted as their leader. The Hegde years in the Eighties saw the Janata Dal being steered towards a majority of its own in 1985.

When he boldly dissolved the House after being routed by Rajiv Gandhi in the Lok Sabha polls, few thought that he would win. But win he did and he set about devolving power to the panchayats, reserving seats for women and developing groundwater irrigation. With lieutenants like Abdul Nazir Sahib, there was no putting a foot wrong.

Or so it seemed.

It was the public works and irrigation minister, H.D. Deve Gowda, who felt cheated. He left the party and fought against it in 1989, ensuring its defeat. When the Janata Dal returned to power in 1994, it was with Deve Gowda at its helm. A year and a half later, Deve Gowda, not Hegde, became prime minister of the third Janata-led government at the Centre.

<b>The Janata Dal was always an uneasy mix of different interest groups. The Vokkaligas and the Lingayats, both dominant peasant castes, from the south and north of the state respectively, had little in common. The main aim was to keep the lower backward classes and Dalits in place. In the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, they made common cause with Muslims, a substantial 12 per cent of the state’s population.</b>

<b>The landed groups more or less dominated the Janata space.</b> In the Eighties, the senior and distinguished Dalit leader, B. Rachaiah, never made it beyond the rank of a senior minister. More recently, A. Siddaramiah, who is from a pastoral community, had to leave the Janata Dal as there is no scope for rising above the second slot.

The same Vokkaliga-Lingayat alliance was sought to be recreated when Deve Gowda and the BJP tied up to share power. The former was still at the head of a rainbow coalition, but as he put family before party, his own old loyalist followers drifted away. The BJP in turn actually gained from the way he toppled its short-lived government in November 2007.

What is more striking about the recently concluded assembly elections is not the defeat of the Congress. <b>What stands out is the scale of the win of the BJP. This is not evident at first glance, but becomes clear once one looks at the various macro-regions that make up the state.</b>

<b>The urban vote was all important.</b> Except in the metropolis of Bangalore, where <b>the turnout was an appallingly low 44 per cent, even lower than in 2004,</b> the turnout elsewhere was good. With 51 seats at stake, the saffron party turned the tables on the Congress. It coasted ahead, taking as many as 17 in Bangalore alone, out of a total of 28. The rise in food prices and stability, two traditional and time-tested Congress party planks, passed over to its adversary.

<b>In the rural hinterland, similar issues worked well.</b> The manifestos of the two parties were strikingly similar. What helped was that Yeddyurappa as the finance minister in the 20-month-long coalition had reduced the farm loan rate. Credit was ready for farmers at 4 per cent, about half the rate of inflation. To add to this, there was the promise of free power. Milk producers were told they would get two rupees more per litre.

<b>The Janata Dal (Secular) had both its clothes and its dreams stolen. It got reduced eventually to a rump, fighting to save face in Mysore and the Hyderabad-Karnataka region. Its votes dropped just a bit, but it lost its prized position of the last four years as king-maker and deal-breaker. </b>H.D. Kumaraswamy and his brother, H.D. Revanna, are here to stay, but they will have to rethink their strategy. <b>More seriously, the Congress is yet to ask what went wrong.</b> S.M. Krishna, who ran the state for five years, was quick to voice his disappointment with the way the campaign unfolded. But the rot goes deeper still. The party did not quite get its act together. Faced with a highly professional adversary that had smelled victory, it was found to be slow, flat-footed and tired.

<b>The Congress’s tactics, as in Gujarat, of bringing in dissident leaders of other parties backfired.</b> Even when, as in the case of Siddaramiah, they won their own seats, the mood of distrust between them and grizzled veteran loyalists did not make for good chemistry. <b>In fact, the Congress’s hopes of a revival rest on a patient re-building of its core constituency of the poor and the under-classes. Even in Bangalore, the hopes of the middle class from the new government are sky high while the prosaic fact is that delivery is difficult in this state because of the multiple fissures in society.</b>

It is this systemic crisis that will be the real challenge for the new government.<b> In the Eighties, Hegde proved far-sighted enough to develop Bangalore’s ring road. In association with the Centre, he also gave land for a technology park which later evolved into a software park. Decentralized governance also made headway. Since then, except for the brief Deve Gowda period from 1994-96, the state as a whole has not seen much by way of government initiative. The contrast, in both urban and rural areas, with Tamil Nadu is striking. Blessed with lower levels of disparity and excellent natural resources, Karnataka could and should have been a pace setter.</b>

How B.S. Yeddyurappa delivers will be critical for him, his party and the country. If the BJP has gained in morale, the Congress has an opportunity to relearn its politics. The future will not wait, and the big electoral battles of 2009 are but less than a year away.

The author teaches history at the University of Delhi
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Polls - Karnataka '08 - by Guest - 03-04-2008, 03:40 AM
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Polls - Karnataka '08 - by acharya - 05-27-2008, 02:24 AM
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Polls - Karnataka '08 - by Capt M Kumar - 06-11-2008, 10:28 AM
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