How the Congress won Karnataka

Two days before the curtains came down on a frenetic election campaign in Karnataka, Congress social media handles began rolling out a video.

On two comfortable chairs sat the party’s two pre-eminent state strongmen; the two claimants to the post of Chief Minister (CM); the men on whose shoulders the campaign rested — Siddaramaiah and DK Shivakumar.

The video was carefully constructed. The leaders spoke to each other about the rigours of the campaign, of an infection on Siddaramaiah’s arm, of a near helicopter crash that Shivakumar survived. They spoke of their confidence and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s fragility; of CM Basavraj Bommai’s inefficiency; and of the insult to the BJP’s Lingayat leaders, including BS Yediyurappa. At one point, Siddaramaiah underlined the entire tenor of the Congress campaign. “The BJP doesn’t talk of local issues. We make promises for the people,” he said.

In many ways, the video encapsulated the efficiency of the Congress campaign, and the obstacles they had overcome in their successful quest for an outright majority in the assembly elections. Here sat two men with unbridled aspirations to the top post, but who, for the campaign at least, had either realised or been made to realise that there would be no spoils if their internal squabbles sank the ship.

The video also underlined the localisation of the Congress campaign, with leaders rarely speaking about national issues as their pitch remained centred around five key promises — free electricity, free foodgrain, an unemployment stipend, monetary benefits to housewives, and free bus travel for women. It helped that CM Bommai’s government was hobbled by allegations of inefficiency, but the creation of a slogan around “40% sarkaara”, a reference to alleged cuts taken by middlemen, and the “PayCM” campaign drove the point home .

Only once did the Congress find itself talking about an issue that seemed to reverberate nationally, when its manifesto promised to ban the Bajrang Dal. Even that was calibrated carefully for, as the results show, it helped the Congress consolidate the Muslim vote in a state where the BJP has pushed the communal envelope. But the Congress made sure that its campaign didn’t get stuck in the familiar communal binary that has hobbled its prospects in parts of north India. Instead, along with Muslims, the Congress was acutely conscious of winning over Hindu social groups, particularly backward classes and Dalits.

But Congress has often had its messaging and coalition right on paper. In Karnataka, the difference was that made the party took this directly to the people. Its leaders criss-crossed the state, issued front page advertisements on their promises, social media handles worked round the clock and the Bharat Jodo Yatra helped in giving the organisation an early start and boosting morale.

With its success in Karnataka, the Congress may have found a template going forward, if not nationally then in other states. It leveraged the strengths of its two primary local leaders — the mass, rustic appeal of Siddaramaiah who moulded himself as a man of the poor and the nous of party president Shivakumar who displayed impressive organisational abilities.

The campaign was aided by national leaders such as Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, who, for the most part, stuck to local issues. The presence of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and his local roots helped. He spoke in Kannada, attacked the Prime Minister, and juxtaposed himself as Karnataka’s “bhumiputra”, just as Narendra Modi was the son of the soil in Gujarat. Kharge’s Dalit identity bolstered the Congress’s social coalition.

With less than a year to go for the 2024 parliamentary elections, the win — and the emphatic nature of it — is undoubtedly a fillip for the Congress. It gives them a fourth state, arguably the most significant politically and economically, where it is in power. The Congress also returns to power on its own in South India after years.

But a key challenge for the Congress begins now. Go back to December 2018, where six months before a national election, the party wrested three major states from the BJP — Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The conditions were similar. These too had powerful Congress regional leaders who drove the campaign and kept their differences aside for the duration of the campaign. But their ambition and the inability of the central leadership to mediate and execute a workable compromise meant that these experiments cracked. Jyotiraditya Scindia left with a clutch of state legislators causing the Kamal Nath government to fall in MP. Sachin Pilot is on a march through Rajasthan in an open rebellion against Ashok Gehlot’s government. And tensions between Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel and TS Singhdeo may come back to haunt the party later this year in elections.

If the Congress does however navigate its way efficiently through these leadership choices like it did during the campaign, it opens a window for the 2024 elections in a state where the BJP won 25 of the 28 seats (and supported an independent who also won, taking its tally to 26), reducing the Congress to one solitary seat. To be sure, by itself, this result does not mean that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is unpopular. In fact, without his campaign blitzkrieg during the last two weeks, the results could well have been worse for the BJP. On the ground, voter after voter made a key, clear separation. The Congress in the state; Modi at the centre.

But the five promises the Congress has made have the potential to build on a narrative that the party’s primary concern is the poor, including the assurance that the Congress government was committed to social justice, and would look to increase reservations to 75%. As the party celebrated on Saturday, a triumphant Rahul Gandhi appeared before television screens and said that the party would implement its five primary promises in the first cabinet meeting. Run an efficient government, keep infighting to a minimum, and deliver on promises, and the Congress may have a good chance of increasing its Lok Sabha tally in 2024.