Pax Yeddyurappa: BJP finally stands by its man

[1]

After months of blundering blindly through the bushes as the challenge posed by the corruption scandal threatened to engulf B.S. Yeddyurappa and the state government, the Bharatiya Janata Party may finally be doing the right thing — standing by their man.

It’s difficult to pin-point the exact moment when that decision may have been taken. Or if it was taken at all, whether it was a conscious move, or something that eventually just happened. But ever so slight as that shift is, the bid to contain the damage brought on by the corruption scandals involving BSY, his kin and some members of his Cabinet, may have finally begun.

Perhaps its due to Delhi’s powers-that-be having realized that distancing themselves from the problem would only ensure the loss of their biggest vote-catcher, however stigmatised, pilloried and hung out to dry by opponents within and without the party.

And, that in many ways it only perpetuates the image of a party — not just the individual — that is seen as overwhelmingly corrupt. An attack on the individual, an attack on the organization...the party and the leader, blurring in the public eye into one image, amorphous, indistinguishable, indivisible…

Perhaps, the BJP realizes that it cannot win this one, and that merely putting BSY on ice, putting him out to pasture serves no useful purpose except to make the former chief minister angrier, more combustible, prone to irrational outbursts.

And finally, that the BJP, which aims to use corruption as the stick with which to beat the Congress at the centre when national polls come up, has no intention of handing over a weapon of that size to the Congress to use against them. At least, not if they can help it. Better to bluster their way out of it, play BSY as the victim than make him a target.

Perhaps a creeping realization has also finally dawned in the opposing camps that working at cross-purposes to undermine the other may be fine in the short-term. But not only is it counter-productive to do so, as everyone’s then painted a villain, but in bringing down Mr Yeddyurappa, the structure of this party, built on sand, would simply not hold. Humpty Dumpty and all of that…

And then there are the stories that are put out, unfailingly, whenever the trooper has his back to the wall, of course, of the overture to the Congress that incidentally, even the inner circle of the Congress say they know nothing about! Manufactured or not, it’s something that Mr Gadkari must have taken cognizance of. He may have been unable to contain the larger than life Narendra Modi set to storm over the national landscape in a new avatar as part of the alternative Jayalalitha-Naveen Patnaik triumvirate come 2013, but he’s not about to let his Karnataka unit run away with itself. He’s given them a very long rope. But time to reel ‘em in, Mr Gadkari?

At another level, the party may have also realized that be it Ananth Kumar, K.S. Eshwarappa, Jagadish Shettar or for that matter, even Sadananda Gowda, being a chief minister requires a certain je ne sais quoi which cannot necessarily be broken down or analysed. Hard to put your finger on what exactly makes Yeddyurappa a leader and Shettar not so much. Or vice versa.

This too must also be said —BSY’s continuing paranoia and sense of shame, as one case after the other is heard in his home town of Shimoga, here in Bengaluru and in the capital Delhi, is probably understandable. Anybody can file a SPL or PIL or whatever these days. And fed by stories of how everyone is ranged against him, it’s so easy for him to believe that up and down the ladder, from the party chief to his mentors to his critics within the state unit, everybody but anybody wants to bring him down. Perforce, there’s an element of truth to it all. When someone’s reached the top of the well, there’ll be hundreds waiting to pull him down… But there it must end. Surely, its time for BSY to shed his comeback fixation, concentrate on where and why the party still needs him. In the seven months that he has been out of power, there are some hard lessons that must have been learned.

The first — while politics is all about managing the medium, the message and the messenger, allowing your associates to reinterpret the pronouncements of the judiciary while lacking a palpable understanding of judicial pronouncements and being unable to judge for yourself what it actually means, is somewhat of a failing. Particularly at this juncture when you are beset from all sides, and its raining judges and their orders!

If I were Mr Yeddyurappa, I would get a crash course in the law and not be dependant on the interpretation of people who obviously stand to gain by skewing the message, just that little bit. A Karnataka High Court order that squashed a case to criminally prosecute BSY, based on Chapter 22 of Lokayukta Mining report which indicted him for allegedly receiving pecuniary gains on the basis that the principles of natural justice were violated, as the accused — that’s Mr Yeddyurappa — was not given a hearing in a case that had been given the governor’s sanction, is not the same as the CJI’s remarks on the Supreme Court appointed Central Empowerment Committee (CEC) report, submitted to the SC.

The report says that documents obtained from the Lokayukta raise suspicion that BSY and his family may have received monetary benefits for granting mining license and that an independent investigating agency like CBI should probe the matter. The SC on Friday held off on sanctioning a CBI probe after one of the lawyers brought to the CJI’s notice that a Special Leave Petition had been filed in the SC and that any judgement on the CEC recommended CBI probe would have a bearing on the SPL.

Giving BSY the impression that this was a victory was more than a little misplaced! In actual fact, it was a bid by the CJI to have clarity on the various cases that are being heard. Instead of muddying the message, the former chief minister must realize that a judgement, be it positive or negative, is inevitable… If not today, then tomorrow, or the day after. The law is inviolate.

In our nation where everything can be bought and sold, from votes to underwear, the courts are the only place where we can expect justice, where wrongs can be righted and where our sense of betrayal at systems that have failed us, stand redeemed. What do we all really want after all? Clean, efficiently run cities, education for our children, jobs for our people, for the Victor Hugoesque “he who votes reigns” to translate into governance where “a hundred hands reach out to those in distress.” Utopia. A perfect world. If I were BSY, I would rededicate myself to these simple truths, rather than rail about re-arranging the world to suit myself.