Bookanakere Siddalingappa Yeddyurappa’s journey to the seat of power began on a humble bicycle, which he rode to victory first in the Shikaripura municipality elections in 1975 and then, literally, on the marathon ride to Vidhana Soudha as a BJP MLA. It was not long before Yeddyurappa transformed from a recluse to a vocal legislator, in the process climbing up the hierarchy in the party and the Assembly, through four successive terms. By 1994, he had become the leader of the Opposition.
That year, he sniffed power for the first time — Congress had unceremoniously ousted its Lingayat chief minister Veerandra Patil, and lost that caste vote-bank forever. His friend-turned-foe and the political star of the eighties Ramakrishna Hegde was in decline. If only Yeddyurappa could cast himself as the leader of Lingayats and steer the BJP to power in the state!
Yet, even as he fashioned himself as a future chief minister, the next step to power took a long time as the fiery Yeddyurappa himself lost his seat in 1999. Five years later, in 2004, Yeddyurappa had managed to only claw back to his old perch as leader of the opposition, although this time the BJP had emerged the single largest party, with 79 of the 224 seats. Congress and JD(S) joined hands to deny Yeddyurappa.
Perhaps, the seeds of the man’s many tactical and strategic errors were sown during this very long wait for power. In 2006, an impatient Yeddyurappa stooped to conquer. He got JD(S) leader H.D. Kumaraswamy to pull the plug on coalition partner Congress. In their 20-20 deal, Kumaraswamy would be chief minister for 20 months in a JD(S)-BJP coalition government, Yeddyurappa for the remaining 20 months before polls.
Trusting Kumaraswamy proved to be his first blunder. When his 20 months as CM were over, Kumaraswamy, son of former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda, refused to hand over power to Yeddyurappa and pulled out of the coalition.
In the ensuing elections, Yeddyurappa rode a sympathy wave and the BJP, with 110 seats, finished just three short of simple majority. He sowed the second seed of his eventual downfall, Operation Kamala, to gain the support of five Independents — bankrolled by Bellary’s Reddy brothers.
But Operation Kamala did not stop there. With money and positions of power to offer, Yeddyurappa and the Reddys continued to lure away Opposition legislators in blatant subversion of democracy. Hubris set in. With Machiavellian ruthlessness, he used Operation Kamala as a plan to destroy Congress and JD(S) completely. The man brooked no opposition, and by the time he was done, there would be none.
Soon enough, though, his blunders came to haunt him. Yeddyurappa realised that he had no real power. The Reddy brothers had bankrolled the BJP’s and his rise to power. Now, they wanted to call the shots. They began attempts to gain control of the administration. His attempts to stop them resulted in frequent coup attempts against him.
That pushed him towards desperate measures, the final blunder that did him in. Yeddyurappa began to amass a fortune himself, with which he would himself bankroll his party and cut the Reddys loose. Once he started to ride the tiger, though, the man lost all perspective, and control. Soon, strategy turned to greed. The desire to stay in power became the same as the desire to misuse power. Dubious deals involving land, permits and discretionary powers followed. And, as it always happens, where the father goes, the sons follow.
Those deals gave the Opposition leaders, especially arch-enemy H.D. Kumaraswamy, the chance they were waiting for, and they began a relentless campaign to dig up Yeddyurappa’s dirt and unseat him. In time, Yeddyurappa’s own ministers and MLAs began to collude with Kumaraswamy.
Surprisingly, through much of this, Yeddyurappa’s RSS advisors stuck with him, believing that the chief minister’s methods were necessary for the BJP’s first-ever government in the South to stand against the mighty Congress and JD(S), who had ruled the state for much of the last 60 years. It was only in late 2010 that his closest advisors from the Sangh Parivar realised that this man had gone out of control. They warned him, but to no avail.
Karnataka politics descended into muck, and even as he won election after election and survived five major attempts to unseat him in 38 months, Yeddyurappa became a headache, an embarrassment, a liability for the BJP central leadership. A sample of his unsubtle ways was when he flew off to Mauritius — a favourite haven of people with dirty money — just before the Lokayukta submitted his report on illegal mining.
That report, in fact, was a god-send for BJP central leaders who had become desperate to remove Yeddyurappa but couldn’t muster the courage themselves. They had to wait for some legal or quasi-legal authority to do their job. Lokayukta N. Santosh Hegde did.