How the BJP let BSY stew in the caste cauldron

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Waiting to exhale… If you were expecting to heave a collective sigh of relief in the belief that all was finally well with the ruling party and this was it, aaaah, we could expect a spell of half-way decent government, think again.

It isn’t relief as we let our breaths out, as much as unease at the realization that yet another attempt at putting this government back on the rails has not gone smoothly, botched, both, by the smug, all knowing men on Ashoka Road as well as here in our Bengaluru. With the active connivance of a few, the party is in danger of overseeing a messy potage, with everyone scrambling for the last slice of the pie, even as governance takes a back seat.

Five days since the swearing-in of a thirty two man cabinet and we have no portfolios assigned, closed door consultations have led nowhere. The new trimurti that hope to run the state until polls, Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar and his two deputy chief ministers K.S. Eshwarappa and R. Ashok are heading to Delhi again.

The blame for the continuing vacuum has to be laid at the door of the BJP’s current denizens of power who see all politics in terms of caste and religion and their attendant vote banks.

To Mr Nitin Gadkari, the question — is Karnataka nothing more than a mosaic of caste and sub-castes that are a stepping stone to the next poll?

The BJP, once synonymous with pushing the religious divide with the demolition of the Babri Masjid and Narendra Modi’s retaliatory Godhra, which moderate India has struggled to put behind it, is stoking an altogether far more dangerous war within the Hindu fold here in Karnataka.

Pitting a Lingayat against a Vokkaliga and vice versa, pleases neither, angers both. Pandering to the Kuruba with one deputy chief minister and the Vokkaligas with another while throwing a sop to the backwards and another to the SCs, the STs, is as we all know, a game that the more venerable parties have all played before.

And while ‘Karnataka as a tinder-box, ready to burst into a raging caste conflagration that could consume us all’ maybe overstating the case, in casting its net wide to include a rainbow coalition of castes and sub-castes, the BJP is testing the waters as it never has in this state.

Playing the caste game requires finesse. The BJP has been clever. Has it been clever enough? Clearly, propping up one Lingayat at the cost of another was to serve one purpose alone — remove B.S. Yeddyurappa from the game altogether.

Cleverer still, in co-opting the ‘only a Lingayat (aka Mr B.S. Yeddyurappa) can lead the party to victory’ strategy from right under the self-same Yeddyurappa’s nose ensures, that it will be Ashoka Road that plays the Lingayat card from hereon, a Lingayat card of their choice rather than be at the receiving end of a BSY tantrum.

BSY is too shell-shocked to unleash his counter-manouevre. But for how long?

It’s taken long enough for Karnataka’s self — appointed leader of the Lingayat community to see the writing on the wall. The cold, harsh truth — he may no longer be able to call the shots in Karnataka. What the courts couldn’t do, or his opponents, his hand-picked choice for chief minister and a fellow Lingayat, has done.

Made him effete, turned him into a toothless tiger who may be able to roar, but it’s a whimper that may no longer be able to frighten his followers into submission. The plain fact is, this rebellion has all but exploded in his face.

Indeed, what price a rebellion, when you don’t get first taste of the spoils? Shoving one chief minister out the door because he wouldn’t jump to attention, replace him with someone you thought you had by the short and curlies, and find he is as, if not more difficult to push around than the ever smiling Sadananda Gowda… Who’s laughing now?

While Gowda took months to show his real intent, that he meant business, Jagadish Shettar hadn’t even finished taking the oath of office when the veneer of geniality slipped and the naked ambition of the no-nonsense politician was revealed. The oft quoted Arabic saying ‘beware the man you benefit..’ couldn’t ring more true.

What is the future then, immediate and in the long term for the new Jagadish Shettar government? At the swearing in, there were more grim faces in the front row than at an execution. If anything it must set a path for confrontation.

This divide in the BJP has a hardcore Yeddyurappa camp, albeit shrinking rapidly, ranged against not just one but two, maybe three groups. Will they unite against him?

Indeed, setting up two centres of Lingayat power, that anyway could not co-exist was the party bigwigs plan to ensure that one must give way to the other.

Plain as day therefore, that BSY’s move to bring in Shettar as chief minister was wrong-headed from the start. In retrospect, his instinct to block Shettar during the crucial vote at the Chancery eleven months ago had been spot on.

That he chose to drown that inner voice and fall back on Shettar as his Lingayat pawn when Gowda wasn’t amenable to persuasion, may have been done with the active urging of the Lingayat mathas, fearful of losing political patronage.

Or as some now say, it was a blind, a ruse, a clever move to bait the party high command into agreeing to leadership change by offering Shettar up as the consensus Lingayat replacement.

This would find acceptance as Shettar, an Ananth Kumar protégé would get the Hubli strongman’s backing and through him, the party patriarch L.K. Advani’s blessings. Advani’s closest adviser on most matters is Ananth Kumar.

Was this Ananth’s plan all along? BSY’s plans, some say was to get Advani to agree to Shettar and then move C.M. Udasi in at the very last minute and present him as a fait accompli, the party’s choice for chief minister.

That it didn’t work and that Yeddyurappa was outflanked and outplayed by a Shettar, the front for Ananth Kumar is now all too obvious. It’s L.K. and Ananth, who finally have their man in place.

Any indication that Shettar was indeed an Ananth Kumar Trojan horse came quickly, when the man whom Yeddyurappa had picked, drove straight to Ananth’s home for discussions on the cabinet and then flew to Delhi rather than discuss the list here with BSY.

BSY is on a committee overseeing decision making, but the final decision will no longer be his. Not now. Not in the future.

If you cannot influence the government on cabinet formation, then what say could you possibly have, on allocation of tickets and collection of monies, be able to call the shots when it really matters, when elections come?

You instigate a rebellion, for this? Thirty one men and one woman make up Karnataka’s new government. And Yeddyurappa gets the crumbs — only three more in the new cabinet — while the others get the pie and the trimmings?

Even Faust would have driven a better bargain.