K Raveendran
Karnataka is the story of a beautiful dream gone sour. Over a year ago, when HD Kumaraswamy’s Janata Dal (Secular) and Congress came together to thwart the BJP bid to form a Government as the saffron party failed to secure a majority, it was as though all the parties opposed to Modi had joined hands. The grand photograph, taken at the swearing in of Kumaraswamy as the Chief Minister, showed Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati, Mamata Banerjee, Sharad Pawar, Sitaram Yechury holding hands in a rare camaraderie, and it soon became the mascot of opposition unity. The optics from Bengaluru suggested imageries of a cornered Narendra Modi, with no chance of making it for a second time in 2019.
The results of the by-elections that followed proved to be the icing on the cake, with the Modi party taking big hits in almost every constituency. That was confirmation of the potential of the new-found opposition unity and the Assembly elections to follow more or less reflected the same trend. So, Modi’s fate appeared sealed.
But as the Lok Sabha elections approached, unity floundered on the personal ambitions of the leaders, who had conjured up their own grand visions. And it was evident that the much-hyped unity of mind and purpose was going nowhere. As campaigning picked up steam, the opposition seemed to lose it way and its balance, failing to read the changing public mood.
Meanwhile, the stories emanating from Bengaluru were not that reassuring. Kumaraswamy gave the impression of being a Chief Minister in distress, often complaining about the bigger partner Congress breathing down his neck. He even threw tantrums in public, protesting to the voters for not giving his party a clear mandate to rule, thereby putting him at the mercy of the senior partner while he took all the flak for Government failures.
With Modi riding what he claimed as India’s first pro-incumbency wave and registering an unprecedented mandate, the very raison d’etre of opposition unity, and by implication the relevance of the Congress-JD(S) alliance in Karnataka, was gone. It would be naïve to imagine that Yeddyurappa and his resource-rich party would let go of the opportunity to upset Kumaraswamy’s apple cart.
Whatever has transpired between the declaration of Assembly election results and the latest episode of Yeddyurappa staking claim to form the next Government overwrites the ‘claim to fame’ of Haryana as the stage for the worst form of ‘Aya Ram, Gaya Ram’ politics. That honour now goes to Karnataka lock, stock and barrel.
The Karnataka sequence begins with two rivals, which fought bitterly in the election, coming together to form a post-poll alliance to keep the BJP away from power. The BJP bid itself was full of intrigues and dramas with the Governor having been accused of acting like the agent of the ruling party at the Centre. Anyway, with a liberal intervention by the Supreme Court through a mid-night session, the first episode of the long-drawn drama ended with the installation of the Kumaraswamy Government.
Whatever has happened since then is a sordid tale of twists and turns, unprecedented in contemporary politics and redraws the contours of political morality, as understood by our democratic traditions and the makers of our Constitution. The statues and the laws were formulated with a certain moral standards in mind; but unfortunately, those values have become alien to the current generation of politicians, who can stoop to any level in pursuit of their greed for power and money.
The anti-defection law, enacted in the backdrop of three-time Haryana Chief Minister Bhajan Lal setting a new low in wholesale turncoat politics, was supposed to deal with all such future scenarios by providing for the disqualification of deviant legislators.
But the Karnataka developments have shown that even the draconian provisions of the law are not biting enough to deal with the new version of ‘Aya Ram, Gaya Ram’ syndrome, in which no incentive is large enough to keep legislators within the flock. And money these days has no smell or colour.
While Karnataka has replaced Haryana in the roll of ‘honours’ as topper, the longevity of its record may not be all that reassuring. It is only a matter of time before the new incumbent gives way to yet another record-breaker. The next in line may be Madhya Pradesh, followed by Rajasthan and even Chhattisgarh.
Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan has already taken ‘anticipatory bail’ by claiming that the BJP will not be responsible if the Kamal Nath Government falls due to ‘Congress infighting’. “We are not dislodging anyone, but whatever is going on there is not good,” Chauhan is reported to have said in an interview.
With ‘infighting’ being one of the easiest things that can be engineered from outside, provided there is enough in terms of resources and political clout, any legislator or a group of them is a potential target. All one can say with certainty is that we are headed for very exciting times, just waiting to unfold. (IPA Service)
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