Poised ahead of the State elections up north in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan later this year and the Lok Sabha polls in 2019, elections to the Karnataka Assembly on May 12 is in the spotlight for more reasons than one.
Karnataka being one of the two big States where it has a presence, much rides on the results here for the Congress to be in the reckoning as a major Opposition party. Karnataka sends 12 members to the Rajya Sabha and 28 to the Lok Sabha. In the present Lok Sabha, the highest number of Congress MPs, nine out of 44, are from the State.
For the BJP, Karnataka is an important hurdle in its aggressive campaign for a “Congress-mukt Bharat” and the only southern State where it has a fighting chance of coming to power. Unlike in 2013, when its present chief ministerial candidate, B.S. Yeddyurappa, broke away to form the Karnataka Janata Paksha and another important leader, B. Sriramulu, formed the BSR Congress, the BJP flock in 2018 stands united, in the iron grip of national president Amit Shah, despite minor hiccups.
Kingmaker?
The Janata Dal(S), a regional party out of power for long, is fighting for survival. If some of the pre-poll surveys are to be believed and the results indeed throw up a hung Assembly, the JD(S) would be an important deciding factor. Its recent alliances with the BSP and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen, led by Asaduddin Owaisi, are expected to split the Congress votes in some pockets.
The Congress has given much autonomy to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to set the tone of the poll narrative, which has so far been one of secularism-development-welfare schemes. “Regional pride” is an add-on factor, with anti-Hindi imposition protests and demand for a State flag as its markers. The jury is still out on whether Mr. Siddaramaiah’s recent move of according religious minority tag to the influential Lingayat community — a vote base of the BJP since the 1980s and the community to which Mr. Yeddyurappa belongs — would pay electoral dividend to the Congress, adding to the AHINDA (minorities, OBC and Dalit) votes but risking an upper caste backlash.
In contrast, the BJP campaign has been entirely centralised, with high reliance on the Amit Shah-Narendra Modi combine.
So much so, the battle lines — in public rallies and online space — are constantly drawn between Mr. Siddaramaiah and the BJP’s central leaders. While Mr. Shah has been micro-managing the campaign — having recently imported a team of 11 of his trusted and tested men to Karnataka to take charge of various regions — Mr. Modi is expected to go on a campaign blitzkrieg from the month-end. The BJP has been levelling charges of corruption (Mr. Modi called it a “10% commission sarkar”) and deterioration of law and order against the Siddaramaiah government. But accent is heavily on the Hindutva narrative, given the BJP’s own corruption legacy.
As elections draw near, interestingly, much political intrigue appears to be afoot.
For instance, Gali Janardhan Reddy, facing investigation for illegal mining and disowned by the BJP till recently, shared the stage last week with Mr. Yeddyurappa and the latter declared that the return had brought “jumbo strength” to the party. His two brothers, Somashekhar Reddy and Karunakar Reddy, have been given ticket by the party.
Mr. Reddy’s close associate B. Sriramulu, meanwhile, is set to take on Mr. Siddaramaiah in Badami, the second constituency in north Karnataka from where the Chief Minister has decided to contest apart from Chamundeshwari in his home district of Mysuru. Mr. Siddaramaiah’s decision on a second contest came amid allegations of a “pact” between the BJP and the JD(S) to defeat him.
