If there’s one thing that can be said about the Karnataka Congress, it is that every leader is an island here. So even if you are on a 340-km long padayatra to Bellary to bring pressure on the Reddy brothers and the state’s BJP government, Congress leaders don’t walk together. They walk one behind the other, like bogies in a train with their own, yes, islands of supporters. Which reveals a thing or two about the ruptures and hierarchies within the grand old party’s state unit.
Ever since the 2004 assembly elections, the Congress has been on a slide in the state, while the BJP has spectacularly expanded its base across regions and communities. Especially after the saffron party came to power on its own in May 2008, it has pulverised Congress morale as well as its bastions. It is in this context that party leaders have made common cause and allowed themselves to be pulled in by an engine called Siddaramaiah.
Without doubt, leader of the Opposition Siddaramaiah is the singular attraction of the padayatra. People wait for long hours with drums and folk dance troupes to receive him. As he arrives, women spontaneously rush to smear vermillion on his forehead and do the traditional aarti. Siddaramaiah too joins in for a jig, even beats the drums as the yatra moves forward to complete the daily target of 20 km. The padayatra itself was Siddaramaiah’s brainchild, a direct result of his angry exchange with the Reddys on the floor of the assembly. And after Sonia Gandhi’s approval, it became the party’s programme though the senior leaders, as an aicc member put it, “warmed up to it only after they saw the tremendous response Siddaramaiah was getting on the field”.
It is no coincidence that Siddaramaiah, twice deputy CM, is drawing huge crowds. He is arguably the only leader with a mass base left in the state Congress. He represents the third largest community of Kurubas (shepherds), and is now the “tallest leader” among the backward classes, Dalits and minorities. And it helps that his public record of three decades is impeccable unlike most other state Congress leaders. As an ex-Congress minister put it, “A few weeks back when the Reddys attacked Congress leaders and presented a list of them involved in ‘illegal mining’, they couldn’t find any charges against Siddaramaiah. It’s strange, but the state Congress now has to hide behind the moral strength of a Janata parivar man who only joined in ’05.”
But there’s also a bigger reason for his emerging as leader at this juncture. And it has to do with the Congress’s own calculations on “recovering” the backward classes, Dalits and minorities (‘Ahinda’ in Kannada) votebase, which it had a monopoly over till the mid-’80s. Political analyst Mahadev Prakash explains: “For various reasons, the Ahinda votebank drifted away from the Congress in the post-Devraj Urs era. The JD got huge chunks of it for two decades and in recent years the BJP too has got a fair share of it. But there is a growing realisation among Ahinda voters that they are treated unfairly in the JD and BJP, dominated as it is by Vokkaliga and Lingayat politics respectively. If the leadership is restored to them in the Congress, they don’t mind shifting back. Now since Siddaramaiah is seen as a powerful leader, the movement of Ahinda voters may have begun. This is the reason for the buoyancy on the padayatra route.” Ahinda voters, incidentally, constitute more than half of the state’s population. No wonder Siddaramaiah keeps repeating he’s game for polls if the assembly is dissolved.
