FRIDAY, AUGUST 02, 2024
Robin Roy
Whether you like it or not, there are some factors in corporates and politics which are similar. Like it is said, there should be no permanent enemies, another factor that surges from a competitive arena is the need of a person. Sometimes, circumstances may push things too far and as a result one may start ‘not liking’ someone but then in terms of professionalism, ignoring a person of consequence can tell heavily on your own fortune.
And that is basically what, to an extent, happened in the case of BJP in the recently held Assembly elections in Karnataka, when BS Yediyurappa was, to an extent, ‘ignored’ by the party.
Anybody remembers what happened in 2013? It was when the Saffron party lost Karnataka after being in power for a full five-year term. What led to the Saffron party’s debacle then was intense internal differences and row which also initiated the exit of Lingayat strongman B S Yediyurappa who had floated the Karnataka Janata Party (KJP).
The KJP may have had logged in a vote share under 10 per cent (9.79 per cent) and it had tasted victory in only six seats in the 224-member Assembly that year (in 2013), but this created a dent in the BJP’s fortunes in as many as 26 seats it had won in 2008 in the Lingayat belts, when the party went on to form its first government in South India!
History repeats itself as they say… again in 2023 Assembly polls. It may be recalled how the BJP eased out Yediyurappa ‘gradually’ way back in 2021 though he did not leave the party nor did the party expel him this time, but side lining the Lingayat strongman was enough reason for the BJP’s defeat in at least around 10 seats in Central Karnataka.
It was be noted that even as the Grand Old party did sweep the Assembly polls, the Saffron party’s score in the Lingayat stronghold was 31 out of 113 seats in 2023 as compared to 56 out of the 113, five years ago. Meanwhile, the Congress has gained from 50 to 78 in these strongholds.
Also, it must be mentioned here that the presence of around 10 Opposition candidates this time round who were Yediyurappa aides and were in the poll fray either from the Janata Dal (Secular) or the Congress or even as Independents after falling out of the BJP — they managed to deeply dent the BJP’s prospects. To establish this argument, it may be mentioned that a huge blow for the Saffron party was witnessed in Chikmagalur due to the Yediyurappa factor, where the BJP’s national general secretary C T Ravi was defeated by Congress candidate H D Thammaiah by a mere 5,926 votes. Thammaiah, a Lingayat, has been a close associate of Yediyurappa. He had left the BJP on the eve of the polls to join the Congress.
Analysing the debacle after the polls, BJP apparently felt that the Yediyurappa impact also played out at several constituencies with large numbers of voters belonging to the Lingayat community who rejected the party’s candidates even as the strongman Yediyurappa did not campaign for them.
Ahead of the 2013 elections, the BJP was faction-ridden too with loyalties aligned with Yediyurappa, B L Santhosh, Basavaraj Bommai and the BJP’s central leadership.
The BJP lost nearly 4 per cent of its vote share from 2018, when it won 104 seats, in the Lingayat-dominated Hyderabad Karnataka, Mumbai Karnataka and the central Karnataka regions where Yediyurappa’s writ is heavily dominant. The BJP lost as many as 25 of the 56 seats it had won in these regions in 2018.
Also the Saffron party’s experimentation with fielding new candidates in 55 Assembly seats in the state yielded victories only in 13.
LESSONS FOR BJP
Karnataka has voted for the Grand old Party exactly after a decade. In 2013, it won 122 seats with a 36 per cent vote share. On Saturday, the Congress won 135 seats and its ally, the Sarvodaya Karnataka Paksha, won the only seat it had contested. Collectively, the vote share was almost 43 per cent.
BJP’s advent and
supremacy in Karnataka
The BJP had acquired the vacuum in Karnataka politics in the Nineties created by the implosion of the Janata Dal. However, in other southern states of the country, the anti-Congress space created was quickly taken up either by the communists, regional parties, and breakaway groups of the Congress — the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, the Telugu Desam (and later the YSR Congress and BRS) in Andhra Pradesh-Telangana, and the CPM.
The BJP’s rise in Karnataka was also boosted to a great extent thanks to the Lingayats, a powerful community that once backed the Congress and had also produced several chief ministers but later drifted apart from the Grand Old party during the early Eighties. BS Yediyurappa, a Lingayat strongman, had built the BJP brick by brick with the Lingayat community as its core vote.
What does this defeat
mean for the BJP?
What does the Karnataka election result mean for the Saffron party? For now, BJP is not in power in any state in the south and it is time, the party should get down to the details and analyse in depth, the result. With the Lok Sabha almost a year away, the party, for now, can focus on the upcoming elections in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. As far as Lok Sabha is concerned, the party mustn’t have sleepless nights right away because with its supremacy in the northern and western states, the Saffron party can still easily assume simple majority for Parliament. It may be noted that out of the 130 seats from the southern states clubbed together, only 30 had come from there.
But as they say in politics, one must not take things lightly.
(Writer is Senior Journalist and Former Senior Associate Editor, O Heraldo)
