The repeated confinement of Karnataka MLAs in resorts suggests that the State’s elected representatives have to literally be physically prevented from selling themselves to their ideological opponents. Given the moral compass of our elected representatives, it would be foolhardy to rule out this possibility. Yet viewing the State’s political events entirely in such commercial terms ignores the larger transition taking place in grassroots politics in Karnataka, one that political parties are struggling to keep pace with.
Rural politics
An often underestimated aspect of Karnataka has been its success with rural decentralisation. Unlike its urban governance, which continues to be dominated by lobbies at multiple levels, from garbage collectors to elite industrialists, the administration of rural Karnataka has a prominent place for its panchayat institutions. Its experiments with decentralisation gathered momentum in the 1980s, well before the 73rd Amendment to the Constitution.
Administrative decentralisation was accompanied by a similar process in the State’s rural politics. Unlike some other States, like Kerala, where administrative decentralisation has taken place under rather more centralised party control, the process in Karnataka has resulted in a greater opportunity, and hence competition, for local political office. The leaders who emerge from this intense competition are typically more confident of their political roots and are not afraid to make this known in Bengaluru.
The BJP, or more accurately B.S. Yeddyurappa (in picture), was the first to recognise the emergence of Assembly constituency-level leadership which could operate independent of a political party. In his first term as Chief Minister, he launched what has come to be called Operation Lotus. In this operation, an Opposition MLA resigned his seat in the State Assembly and was promptly re-elected as a member of the ruling party. This enabled Mr. Yeddyurappa to convert his minority government into a majority one.
A decade later, the same process of decentralisation has worked against the BJP leader. With local competition throwing up even more leaders in each constituency, the number of MLAs who can be confident of re-election has declined. The BJP also needs more MLAs to cross over than it did the last time. But Mr. Yeddyurappa, having previously used the emergence of new local leaders to bring the BJP to power, probably feels he can do it again.
In trying to deal with the new set of previously unknown and ideologically promiscuous leaders, parties in Karnataka have usually fallen back on caste. The Janata Dal (Secular) relies quite heavily on its core base of Vokkaligas. The BJP is relatively more broad-based but takes extra care to protect its Lingayat flock. The Congress strategy is to absorb as many caste groups as possible. This ensures that caste conflicts are internalised within the party, and the possibility of sabotage at election time in the Congress is probably the highest among the State’s parties.
Using caste to net emerging local leaders is also not immune to the pressures of effective political decentralisation. Competition among emerging political leaders exists within castes as well. Taking one leader into a party often means the exit of his opponent from the same caste. In some constituencies, in the 2018 Assembly election, the main candidates were the same but they had exchanged parties.
Battle within castes
What is of greater concern to Karnataka’s political parties is that the battle within castes can take on a longer-term ideological colour. This is most evident in the case of Lingayats. The caste has for some decades been under a leadership that would like to take it deeper into the Hindu fold. They tend to treat the 12th century poet-saint Basavanna as no more than an important footnote in the history of the caste. This has been challenged by the historically less privileged sections of Lingayats who see Basavanna as one who challenged the basic tenets of the caste system and hence Hinduism itself. Their demand to treat the followers of Basavanna as belonging to a different religion has become a major bone of contention.
Karnataka’s political parties are struggling to come to terms with this division. The conventional wisdom is to pretend it does not exist. The BJP would like see a continuation of the status quo so that Lingayats remain a part of the Hindu community and there is no division in the major support base of the party. The Siddaramaiah-led Congress government supported the case for the followers of Basavanna to be treated as a separate religion. This led his opponents in the party to blame its poor performance in the last election on this decision, though the party did worse in the non-Lingayat regions of coastal and southern Karnataka.
The way out of the current confusion of parties running helter-skelter to capture ‘winning’ leaders would be the emergence of a new vision, one that new leaders would gravitate towards. But there is no such vision, or visionary, on the horizon.
Narendra Pani is a Professor at National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru
