In the UPA's victory margin in the trust vote on July 22, Karnataka's share was close to30 percent. Two BJP members and one JD(S) member from the state voted for the UPA government; one BJP member abstained; one BJP member was unwell and therefore absent and the Bellary BJP MP, G. Karunakara Reddy, had resigned recently after having won an Assembly seat. In other words, it is the state BJP that has given the UPA a handsome victory.
Even assuming only three BJP MPs were spiteful and it was bad luck with the two others, for a party that has just tasted a historic win in the state and inSouth India, to face such nationally embarrassing dissidence in its ranks is simply shocking. In some ways, I would say, the BJP has been given a taste of its own medicine.
Only a fortnight ago, the Karnataka unit of the BJP had engineered defections in theopposition ranks. It had got five MLAs, three from the Congress and two from the JD(S) to resign their Assembly seats and join the party. Of these five, three were instantly made cabinet ministers, one was made the chairman of the slum development board and the other one is being taken care of well. This defection was unprecedented because anopposition MLA was giving up his hard won seat in less than a couple of months to join the ruling party and their motives were amply clear. Now, these five legislators plan to recontest the bypoll they have forced on their constituents with a BJP ticket. Given the fluidity of politics one is not sure if they would be re-elected, but that is not something I want to speculateon right now. There were in fact thick rumours that more opposition MLAs, especially from the Lingayat community to which the chief minister belongs, would crossover and secure the government that enjoys only a wafer thin majority in the Assembly through the support of six fickle independents.
This game of moving legislators to secure governments is not new to political parties and that does not exclude the BJP as we have seenrecently in Karnataka. But given this record, how the BJP could deign to assumesuch a moral highground just before and after the trust vote on July 22 is something that has contributed to my bafflement in the last few days.The intent is not to condone or defend the wrongs of the Congress and the UPA, but to point out the splintered mind of the BJP. Clearly, two wrongs don't make a right.
An interesting element in the July 22 tale is that all the BJP MPs who cross-voted or abstained have done so in cold revenge. There has been no apparent financial luring as is being alleged in a few other cases. Sangliana, the former top cop and Bangalore North MP, had been ignored in the party for long and was the only one who had resented his party's decision to deny tickets to any minority community during the recent Assembly polls. Udupi MP Manorama Madhwaraj, was very unhappy that the BJP was not supporting her agitation against the setting up of the Nagarjuna thermal power plant in her constituency. Her son had even contested the Assembly polls on a Congress ticket and had lost. When the BJP charged her the other day with taking money to abstain, she said that she will not resign from her seat until the CBI probed the charges and exonerated her. Dharwad South MP, Manjunath Kunnur, has been unhappy with the prominence the BJP was giving Basavaraj Bommai, the son of S R Bommai, in the Dharwad region. Bommai who is now a cabinet minister holding the major irrigation portfolio had crossed over from the JD(U) before the Assembly poll.
It appears that the malaise in the state BJP is much deeper than this cross-voting and abstention. It is quite surprising as to how quickly the new chief minister has been able to isolate his own partymen. As pointed earlier in these columns, there is a divisive debate inside the state BJPon whether the Assembly poll victory was a result of the Reddy brothers and the mining money orwhether it was due to the Lingayat community standing firmly by the party. Neither is the whole truth, but vested interests will not allow the debate to die down. A strange remark that I heard in the portals of power after the UPA won the trust vote was: 'the BJP flock would have perhaps been together had the Reddy brothers been involved in the operation.' I am not sure if this was meant as a complement for the Reddy brothers, but it was clearly a comment against the CM, who had hosted a dinner for the state MPs the day before the trust vote and had not smelt a rat in any corner.
When the BJP was three short of majority to form a government in May, the Reddy brothers were credited with swinging the loyalties of the six independent MLAs in favour of the BJP. How they did it is now part of the state's political lore. The five MLAs who quit their seats recently are also said to have done so after coming under the magic spell of the Reddys. People inside the BJP say that Yeddyurappa is conceding political space to the Reddys to his own detriment, but then the question is how can the Reddys be resisted and restrained? They are good businessmen who know their investments are for the long term. Yeddyurappa's insecurity is showing inthe appointments made by him. His principal secretary, his private secretary, his intelligence chief, his media secretary, the Bangalore police commissioner and many other key postings in the government have gone to people from his own community. It is as if he can't trust anybody outside his community ring. There have also been collateral damages in government formation. To accommodate the six independents and five newly crossed over MLAs, the BJP has had to play down prominence to its own loyal men. Especially some senior ministers are unhappy that their initially allotted portfolios had to be clipped to accommodate the raiding outsiders. Add to this the power crisis, the police firing against farmers, bad monsoons, the Padmapriya case and a budget that fell short of expectations created in a populist manifesto....
The BJP, both at the state and the centre, a few days ago, had everything going in its favour butit seems to have grossly mismanaged the situation. There is now a tail wind for the UPA to build on before the general elections. I am not suggesting that the Congress and its allies are great managers of success, but clearly the BJP and the NDAhave blown up their chance for now. Everytime the BJP fails with its strategy, it adopts a hollow and unsustainable moral tone. It mayclaim that it is a party with a difference but it is also a party with some three decades of history now (more if one counts the Jan Sangh years). In these three decades, the BJP has enjoyed power, run governments and also toppled them. Power has a great way of levelling, it cancels out all moral advantages.
