In Karnataka battle, will caste vs religion play dominant role?

Is the Congress deluded by its own propaganda, internal surveys and rhetorical claims of a 130-plus tally in the upcoming elections? Can it decisively wrest power from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) whose challenge is weakened by anti-incumbency and the lack of a pan-Karnataka face after BS Yediyurappa’s semi-retirement? More importantly, will the outcome be decisive the way it was in 2013? Or will the electorate throw up a fractured verdict like in 2018?

None among the three principal contestants including the Janata Dal (Secular) have clear-cut answers to these questions. The Congress indeed is the only party to have secured a clear majority in recent decades to form governments under Kuruba leader Siddaramaiah in 2013 and the Vokkaliga icon of yesteryear, SM Krishna in 1999.

The Congress’s hope of a return to power has its genesis in internal seat projections ranging from 106-121, according to a party functionary privy to in-house parleys. As an upfront claimant to the chief minister’s office, Siddaramaiah’s boast of a 130-plus tally in an interview to this newspaper, is based on his own assessment and that of election strategist Sunil Kanugolu. The latter’s inputs were generously used by the leadership in candidate selection.

Be that as it may, it’s difficult to wager on the post-2014 Congress that has mastered the art of letting the cup slip from the lip! From appearing to be a sure winner a couple of months ahead of the 2022 Punjab elections, it sank to a distant second in the Aam Aadmi Party’s landslide win. The sole exception to that rule since Narendra Modi’s emergence on the national scene was Himachal Pradesh where a localised campaign paid off.

Relatively speaking, Karnataka-2023 does seem different and doable for the Congress. Its candidatures are better and the campaign narrative woven around graft, joblessness and inflation, under an overarching social justice theme, fairly cogent. The party, desperate to wrest a major state from the seemingly invincible BJP, has looked reassured and better geared for the May 10 poll.

Various factors account for the dynamics at play; the foremost being the fact that the BJP has ended up depending on caste identities. Its grandiose plan to scrap, redistribute and subdivide reservation benefits has put caste front and centre at the expense of its Hindutva plank. Having unveiled the controversial scheme too close to elections, the party has failed to knit a tractionable narrative around its tactics to take away from the Muslims and please the influential Lingayats and Vokkaligas. A similar plan to earmark sub quotas within quotas for scheduled castes has similarly backfired.

“Mandal’s weighing heavier on Kamandal; the caste sentiment is blurring religious polarisation,” remarked a former MP who had JD-S patriarch Deve Gowda’s ear when the latter was Prime Minister in 1996-97. “Many are unhappy and none too pleased by the tinkering BJP did with the existing quotas,” he argued, pointing to a plethora of caste protests, especially by the SC sub-category of “touchables” who believe they were better off under the older reservation regime.

The BJP’s religious spin to the Congress’s promise of reining in the Bajrang Dal has the characteristics of rearguard action to recoup religio-political space, which may be found wanting in most regions of the state bar the coastal belt where religion reigns supreme.

Time alone will tell as to who wins the caste-religion see-saw. But the Congress’s promise of enhancing reservation quotas to 75%t beyond the Supreme Court-mandated 50% ceiling (which, recent SC judgements indicate, isn’t really a ceiling) is quite clearly an effort to dip into the ascendant Mandal sentiment. It began with Rahul Gandhi’s call for a caste census-- at his inaugural election meeting at Kolar-- to match reservation rights with individual demographic shares. The party’s recently released manifesto for Karnataka is an argued expression of that approach.

It’s hard to guess whether Amit Shah’s averments about the emergence of a “new caste” of beneficiaries, called labharthis in the north, will manifest on the voting day in the party’s sole southern home. Even if it works, questions remains about the extent and reach of such welfarism.

On the ground there are signs of a blowback to the BJP-scripted internal quota and the manner in which it selected candidates. Take the case of a Bengaluru-based lawyer, NT Nagaraj who has been a BJP voter since AB Vajpayee’s days. “But not this time,” he declared, “I’m going with the Congress to beat back the BJP’s Brahminical thrust....” A Bhowi from Chitradurga in Karnataka’s north-west, he compared his caste with Uma Bharti’s Lodh community of northern India. He didn’t put it in as many words. But his allusions were no different from BJP renegade Jagdish Shettar’s charge of being denied the party ticket at the behest of a Brahmin lobby led by BL Santosh and Prahlad Joshi.

Apart from the predominant caste factor, the BJP’s over-dependence on Modi and Shah in the ongoing electioneering isn’t fetching the kind of traction they get in the party’s Hindi-speaking citadels. Withthe BJP’s familiar local face, Yediyurappa becoming “non-playing captain,” the Congress’s public outreach seems better scripted, what with its campaign spearheaded by its Vokkaliga face, DK Shivakumar and the hugely popular Siddaramaiah who’s a forceful speaker in Kannada.

In a crowd of tainted peers across parties, Siddaramaiah has a blemish-free record and he is known to be a tough task master. In popular perception, he leaves far behind the incumbent CM, Basvaraj Bommai who many in the BJP itself view as a “weak and wavering” administrator.

With Deve Gowda slowed down by age and his son HD Kumaraswamy yet to acquire his father’s aura, Siddaramaiah is the only full-time mass leader in the fray. The crowds were ecstatic at a public meeting he addressed for the Congress’s Vokkaliga candidate in Tumkur’s Siraon April 30. An assembly of over 10,000 heard him in thrall after having stampeded on seeing him arrive.

But in his own constituency Varuna, near Mysuru, Siddaramaiah is in a bit of a spot against the BJP’s V Sommana, a Lingayat and the JD-S’s Dalit nominee, Dr Bharathi Shankar. A tacit BJP-JD-S understanding is obvious in their selection of candidates for the seat with a sizeable Lingayat and SC population. The voices one heard in the Lingayat villages there were in Sommana’s support with prospects of a section of SCs likely to be influenced by the BJP’s sitting Dalit MP, Srinivas Prasad. Having exited the Congress on being dropped as a minister, the latter has an axe to grind with the former CM.

Siddaramaiah is helped nevertheless by his pull as a formidable CM-aspirant besides the popularity in the area of his son, Yathindra, a sitting MLA who vacated the seat for his father. That should help the Kuruba leader work his social alliance of Ahinda (OBCs, SCs and Muslims). But the possibility of the caste-combine growing to be Ahinda-Linga are remote in his own constituency, given the Lingayats’ clear tilt toward his BJP rival showcased as the community’s next big-face!

On that score, it’s instructive to recall that Siddaramaiah’s 2013 full majority government happened when Yediyurappa briefly quit the BJP to form his own party. The question is whether the Lingayat strongman who’s campaigning for the BJP without being a candidate, can truncate the Congress’s winning social alliance the way he did in 2018?

In that eventuality, a hung House will help the BJP better, given that there’s no love lost between Siddaramaiah and the JD(S)’s Gowda family which is crucial for government formation in a fractured house. The resultant flux will complicate as much the internal Congress powerplay where the Gowdas’ fellow Vokkaliga, D K Shivakumar is also a contender for the CM’s office.