The non-Congress, non-BJP parties rallied in Dobbespet, and now the Congress president is scheduled to flag off their campaign from Davangere in north Karnataka next Monday. Karnataka has suddenly leapt out of the history books to recall its special (if only periodic and anecdotal) place in national politics and identity. Bartini, is “I will just return” in Kannada. As in several other Indian languages, “I am leaving”, is never quite the theme when you bid goodbye. The refrain is always, “will just come back”. Bartini, it appears, is what several non-BJP parties have in mind as Karnataka seems to have slipped back into the news in the rumble and tumble of

pre-poll activity.

With just 28 seats, and with the state having seen a squeezing of the “third front” space in the assembly polls last year and the formation of the South’s first BJP government, it has not been very fruitful to talk about prospects in Karnataka. An important leader of the Syndicate, key to giving Indira Gandhi a hard time before she became the Iron Woman she finally did, was the Karnataka satrap Nijalingappa. But even just after the Emergency, the state stayed very loyal to the party and stood behind the Congress. Partly, that was because of the emergence of the Devraj Urs phenomenon; Urs, twice chief minister, shaped Karnataka in those difficult years. He first stood with Indira Gandhi and then ultimately split, paving the way, many say, for the emergence of Ramakrishna Hegde, his Janata experiment and, ultimately, Deve Gowda, all of whom also played their part in national politics and had Delhi very much on their radar. In fact, it was Ramakrishna Hegde who first spoke of a “federation of opposition parties” to oppose the Congress, in the heyday of ’80s anti-Congressism. This was many years

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