Karnataka has been the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) gateway to the southern states. It is well over a decade and a half since the party had first crossed that gateway. Yet, after all these years, it has not grown into a significant political force in other states in the region, although it is in power as a junior alliance partner in the Union Territory of Puducherry. What has worked for BJP elsewhere in the country has worked only as far as Karnataka in the south.
The people of the south have a lot of things in common, except for politics. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has always had a state-wide presence in Kerala, and it has grown in organisational strength steadily in Tamil Nadu since 2010. But this growth has never translated into political success in either state. Karnataka and Kerala have a strong presence of Congress, whereas regional parties govern politics in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana. Karnataka election results have further diminished BJP’s chances of expanding into these states.
Failing To Impress The South
The major problem is that BJP has not been able to present a model of governance in Karnataka that other states can emulate. The party has not been able to retain power in any of the assembly elections. In terms of their approach in administrative matters, there’s not much to choose between the Congress and the BJP.
This time too, corruption and disunity created a strong anti-incumbency sentiment against Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai’s government. BJP could not keep several of its old hands in good humour. Apart from the usual rebels, some stalwarts from the old brigade too defected to the Congress and contested against them.
BJP’s Hindutva politics too doesn’t find many takers in the south. Debates on hijab and azaan didn’t further the party’s prospects in Karnataka, and neither did its election promises of uniform civil code and national register for citizens (NRC). Announcement of these policies without necessary public discourse created confusion among the voters, which outweighed the benefits proposed. The state’s decision to scrap the four percent Other Backward Castes (OBC) quota for Muslims and split it between Lingayat and Vokkaliga castes was also widely criticised, even by the Supreme Court, which termed the move as shaky and flawed.
Although it was part of the routine process, the Lok Sabha Secretariat’s issuance of disqualification notice to Rahul Gandhi following the Gujarat court order over his controversial Kolar speech, and the demand to vacate his official residence did not go down well with the voters. Congress succeeded in projecting these incidents, along with the cases against DK Shivakumar by various central investigation agencies, as targeted attacks against its leaders.
BJP could not keep a clean slate on corruption either, which was perhaps its biggest downfall. The Bommai government could not exculpate itself from the slew of allegations by contractors that a former minister and other government officials took 40 percent commission from state projects. This even dented BJP’s national image of keeping its development-oriented affairs corruption-free. In short, the BJP government in Karnataka was everything that the party has been opposing elsewhere in the country.
Dialling Modi Won’t Help
Having realised its perilous position in the state, BJP fielded Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself in the poll campaign more actively than in any of his recent campaigns. The party think-tank should realise that the “Modi wave” saving the party from every crisis is just a chimera – it cannot happen when all other party systems have failed.
In Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, BJP returned to power because both engines of the “double engine sarkar” were working in unison to deliver results in accordance with the party’s vision of Sabka Vikas. In Karnataka though, the Delhi engine focused on big ticket infrastructure projects, such as the 119-km Bengaluru-Mysuru expressway, but the Bengaluru engine forgot the mantra of Sabka Saath when it came to the people in semi-urban and rural areas.
For some reason, BJP’s central leadership either ignored or condoned the incompetence of the state government. BJP has always adopted this indifferent position irrespective of who the chief minister was in Karnataka. It, instead, enjoyed the share from the state to its overall numbers in the Lok Sabha.
More than any external factor, it is the BJP’s own apathy that has prevented it from growing in the south. This experience close at hand has been largely uninspiring for the people as well. If the leadership does not disentangle this self-inflicted convolution, Karnataka will remain as BJP’s southern end on India’s political atlas.
(Sreejith Panickar is a Kerala-based political commentator. Twitter: @PanickarS. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.)
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