: Karnataka has been an interesting “link” state, so to speak, between the politics of the “North” and the “South”, over the past 15 years. Before that, till well after the Emergency, it swore by the Congress and the elections reflected this — even in 1991 it was 23 Lok Sabha seats to the Congress out of the total 28. This explains Indira Gandhi’s choice of Chikmagalur as a “safe” seat in difficult times; a decision that was reflected in Sonia Gandhi’s emotional choice of Bellary when she first contested elections in 1999. But with the emergence of the Janata Dal, the Janata Dal’s considerable say in national politics and then the BJP, Karnataka has mirrored Hindi-belt politics in a way that no other south Indian state has done — in the issues and in the way the vote share has gone.
In the past 12 years, barring one election, in all the four Lok Sabha polls, the BJP has been consistently getting more seats in Karnataka than the Congress. It was just in 1999 that the Congress got 18 seats and the BJP seven. So, the BJP victory in the assembly this month was something waiting to happen — something the Congress number-crunchers should have anticipated.
The Congress fought this in a now-familiar Congress fashion. About eight chief ministerial candidates, para-trooping national leaders, weekend election managers, not a single local face to embody its politics and, most of all, no real “politics” it could claim as its own. The farm loan waiver was projected as something for farmers here, but there was nothing much done to project itself as a party sensitive to rural India. The Janata Dal (S) too proved very hard to edge out in the southern Old Mysore region.
For the Congress, the failure to project itself “politically” has implications for its future in the medium term and for the next Lok Sabha polls. Now “political” is a vague though much bandied-about term, which alludes to a strong sense of association with what is going on in people’s lives, and an ability to transform that information and instinct into an idea or larger policy; charisma is an important part of one’s ability to connect, but not the only thing required. So the Congress did well in seats visited by Rahul Gandhi, but the stamina needed to turn his freshness and charisma into a new or energetic “politics”...
Seema Chishti
