A sporting chance in Karnataka

So far, interventions by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in leadership disputes in the Congress’s state units have not exactly yielded optimal results. In Punjab, foisting Navjot Sidhu on the Congress there led to a vertical split in the state unit of the party and enabled the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) to strike deep root where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was no competition and the Shiromani Akali Dal was widely discredited. The Congress wrested defeat from the jaws of victory in the last Assembly elections as a result. In Chhattisgarh, the truce between Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel and T S Singh Deo is uneasy and disaffection is simmering. In Rajasthan, tension between Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and rebel leader Sachin Pilot is in check only because Mr Pilot has got some sort of acknowledgement from the Gandhi siblings that he has a point: Which has put Mr Gehlot’s back up.

A state where the Congress might have a decent chance at a stab at power in the Assembly elections (due 2023) is Karnataka. And party leaders there are watching Mr Gandhi’s moves with mild alarm. He was in Davanagere earlier this week to celebrate former chief minister Siddaramaiah’s 75th birthday: Something that was duly noted by supporters of D K Shivakumar, the other big leader in the state Congress. In Karnataka, Mr Gandhi attended a meeting of the state Congress’s Political Affairs Committee (PAC). “The committee discussed the party organisation and policy matters. The meeting also discussed preparations for the 2023 Assembly polls ... The PAC will meet frequently and take collective decisions in the interests of the party. Rahul Gandhi appealed to leaders of the party to go aggressively and unitedly against the misrule of the BJP in Karnataka and at the Centre,” All India Congress Committee General Secretary K C Venugopal said after the meeting, with unusual frankness.

The key words here are “collectively” and “unitedly”. It is the state’s worst-kept secret that Mr Shivakumar and Mr Siddaramaiah have been at each other’s throat. The two men are like chalk and cheese, including their pedigree. Mr Siddaramaiah began his career in the Janata Dal-Janata Dal (Secular) and joined the Congress after being sidelined by patriarch H D Deve Gowda in favour of his sons, while Mr Shivakumar has always been in the Congress and has risen through the ranks since he joined the Youth Congress in the early 1980s, when still in college. The only thing that unites the two is their antipathy to the Deve Gowda clan — Mr Shivakumar, because he is a Vokkaliga like Mr Deve Gowda and first challenged the former prime minister in Sathanur in 1985 in an election when he was just 25. Not unexpectedly, he lost, albeit by a narrow margin, in itself, not a small feat because Mr Deve Gowda was then a senior minister in the Ramakrishna Hegde government. But Mr Deve Gowda, who had contested from two constituencies, opted to quit Sathanur, which Mr Shivakumar fought and won in the byelection and then began a battle with the Deve Gowda family, which has changed its look and shape but remained, in essence, exactly what it was: A battle. When Mr Shivakumar filed his affidavit for the 2018 Karnataka Assembly elections, he and his wife declared assets amounting to Rs 730 crore. He listed his profession as “social worker”. He could have written anything: But in south Karnataka (as elsewhere in India) the currency of power is land and caste.

By contrast, Mr Siddaramaiah belongs to the Kuruba (shepherd) community and has a strong connect with rural Karnataka. This manifests itself as an exaggerated anti-urban bias he does not bother to hide, a hallmark of his younger days and the tutelage of strong farmer lobbies which had leaders like M D Nanjundaswamy of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha. He was made chief minister in 2013, despite being a relatively new entrant to the party, ignoring the claims of other senior leaders like S M Krishna and Dalit leaders like Parameswara.

Mr Siddaramaiah may have turned 75 but has lost none of the parry, cut and thrust of public speaking that makes many in the Assembly smile when he speaks.

Mr Shivakumar has used personal wealth to earn political capital. These stories are well known. The 2002 episode when the Maharashtra chief minister and Congress leader, the late Vilasrao Deshmukh, had all but lost the government in a no-confidence motion, it was Mr Shivakumar, urban development minister in Karnataka at the time, who corralled MLAs and lodged them at the Eagleton Resort (whose walls, if they could speak, would yield many secrets) and led them to Mumbai on the day of the vote. Ahmad Patel won his Rajya Sabha seat from Gujarat in 2017 on the strength of the efforts put in by Mr Shivakumar to keep 44 MLAs from Gujarat “safe”. Later still, he used his business relationships in Hyderabad to ferry MLAs from Bengaluru to a Hyderabad resort, asking Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao for nothing more than that they be kept safe and secure. That’s how, in 2018, Yediyurappa, despite having 104 MLAs out of 224 and being the single-largest party in the Assembly, was forced to yield space to H D Kumaraswamy and the Congress. In this operation, Mr Shivakumar beat Amit Shah at the game.

Now, as the BJP is internally riven by power battles orchestrated from Bengaluru as well as New Delhi, and the CM is a target of attack from his own party for not doing enough to keep BJP activists safe, the Congress has a slight chance of returning to power —if it can get its act together: And if Mr Gandhi makes no sudden moves.