20 THE CARAVAN
temple run · perspectives
will vote en masse for the BJP and Yeddyurappa.
Meanwhile, the dissent within the party is re-
fusing to die down. Media reports said that the
recent parivarthana yathra that Yeddyurappa took
out across the state, as a prelude to the election
campaign, witnessed a poor turnout, mainly be-
cause of the infighting in the party, which came
to the fore in many places where Yeddyurappa
addressed public meetings. In Bidar, for example,
two factions put up separate stages, forcing him
to address the crowds from both.
With no strong state leadership to steer the
campaign, no big issues to attack the govern-
ment on and no assured Lingayat vote bank, the
BJP’s election strategy seems to revolve entirely
around Modi and Hindutva. Amit Shah, the BJP
president, has been making repeated visits to the
state to galvanise the cadre for booth-level work.
For the task of communal polarisation, the party
has roped in Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister, Ad-
ityanath. During the two rallies he has addressed
in the state so far, his speeches focussed primar-
ily on religious issues. The party has declared
that the UP chief minister is going to be one of its
star campaigners. Union minister, Anant Kumar
Hegde, a five-time member of the Lok Sabha from
the Uttara Kannada constituency, has attacked the
“minority-appeasement” politics of the Congress.
He did not stop his provocative speeches even
after he was made to apologise in parliament for
his recent disparaging remarks on secularists. The
state’s coastal belt, consisting of Dakshina Kan-
nada, Udupi and Uttara Kannada districts, has
seen a series of communally motivated murders
over the past five years. Although both Hindus and
Muslims have been victims of communal tension,
the BJP has accused the Congress of siding with
the Muslims and carrying out a massacre of the
Hindus.
To build on this groundwork, Modi is slated to
address a series of rallies, starting in the last week
of January. His popularity, illustrated by the BJP’s
victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha election, would
definitely help the BJP. In that election, just a year
after the BJP’s rout in the Karnataka assembly
polls, the party won 17 of the 28 seats in the state.
Demonetisation and GST do not seem to have
dented Modi’s image much.
However, in Karnataka, Modi will be up against
a powerful state leader in Siddaramaiah. When
he assumed office as chief minister five years ago,
Siddaramaiah already had the image of an able
administrator. The media often characterised him
as a “bureaucratic politician,” which meant he was
good at governance but weak as a political strate-
gist. But five years down the line, the perception
appears to be on the verge of a reversal. Sidda-
ramaiah’s administration seems to have nothing
spectacular to boast of, but his record as a politi-
cian has surprised many. He dealt a big blow to
the JD(S) by poaching seven of its MLAs. He also
managed well the insider-outsider conflict within
the Congress—between original partymen and
those who joined the Congress from other parties.
Although he joined the Congress in 2006 from the
JD(S), he has emerged as the unchallenged leader
of the party in Karnataka. Siddaramaiah has as-
siduously tried to cultivate the support of the
Other Backward Classes and the state’s minori-
ties by significantly increasing the budget of the
social-welfare department.
The Congress has also been playing the re-
gional card in order to counter the BJP’s nation-
alist agenda. A water dispute over the Mahadayi
River between Karnataka and BJP-ruled Goa has
become an election issue. Modi’s unwillingness
to intervene in the dispute has been held up as an
example of how the prime minister and the BJP
have been discriminating against Karnataka.
The Congress is also repeatedly reminding vot-
ers that Modi has done nothing to help Karnata-
ka in its longtime feud with neighbouring Tamil
Nadu over sharing the Kaveri River’s water. It
has also tried to whip up pro-Kannada sentiment
by proposing a separate flag for Karnataka, and
resisting the use of Hindi in government com-
munication in the state. The Congress is using
the BJP’s silence on these issues to argue that
Karnataka’s interests are not safe under the BJP,
and that the latter pursues a nationalist agenda
at the cost of the states. But, being a national
party, the Congress has obvious limitations in its
attempts to play up regional identity politics and
language issues.
At the moment, it appears that Siddaramaiah’s
leadership and an alternative version of Hindutva
are the two main weapons in the Congress ar-
moury that could halt the Modi juggernaut. In all
likelihood, therefore, the Congress’s new electoral
strategy of inclusive Hindutva is going to have its
first real litmus test in the upcoming Karnataka
election. sAt the moment, it appears that Siddaramaiah’s leadership and an
alternative version of Hindutva are the two main weapons in the Congress
armoury that could halt the Modi juggernaut.
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