While the 2023 Karnataka election taking place on 10 May is expected to be a bipolar contest between the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress Party, the Janata Dal (Secular) will play an extremely important role in deciding who sits on the throne, should one of the two national parties fail to attain a majority in the state Assembly.
To better understand the political equations of the state, The Quint interviewed Chandan Gowda, Ramakrishna Hegde Chair Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, who spoke about the Lingayat factor, former Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa's clout, the Modi factor, the significance of the JD(S), and the polls that predict a Congress victory.
Q: Veerendra Patil was among the many Lingayat leaders who served as the chief minister of Karnataka. However, when the Congress leader suffered from a stroke, the then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, dismissed him as the chief minister, with the decision allegedly being made by Gandhi at the Bengaluru airport, without even consulting Patil. This was perceived as a humiliation by the Lingayat community in the state, which started to shift its support from the Congress to the BJP. But now, three decades on, senior Lingayat leaders like Jagadish Shettar and Laxman Savadi have switched parties from the BJP to the Congress. So, is this the BJP's 'Veerendra Patil moment'?
It has the potential to become a Veerendra Patil moment. It remains to be seen how the Congress cashes in on that. The JD(S) is not doing much about it because it doesn't have much of a presence in northern Karnataka where the Lingayats are a large votebank.
What you see is that after these leaders joined the Congress , in every opportunity, they say that they have been betrayed and that the community has been sidelined. There are a couple of Lingayat legislators doing that kind of talk, but you don’t see a massive, all-party effort by the Congress trying to claim this, using this as an opportune moment.
It’s possible that they might be nervous about how the BJP might use that to their advantage, because if you heard Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai’s responses to this situation, he has been saying, "You can’t hurt the Lingayat vote."
Q: What about the Yediyurappa factor? What is he up to? He is, after all, BJP's most powerful leader in the state and he is a Lingayat. Can he make a difference despite his choosing to not contest the elections this time?
With the removal of a few top Lingayat leaders, the unexpected decision of those leaders to walk out of the BJP and join the Congress, and the emerging feeling that the BJP might not be having the welfare of the Lingayat community in their minds anymore, they needed to do damage control.
In this respect, BS Yediyurappa has come handy, and he has gone along with the party’s request to do damage control. He has been doing it consistently, and aggressively, and now you see the party being defensive in a way you never saw it. He’s doing what he can so that the party doesn’t alienate the Lingayat vote too much.
Q: Okay, so on the Modi factor. Assuming that it doesn't work, and the BJP loses the assembly elections, the data still shows that in 2014 and in 2019, in the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP performed better compared to the assembly elections. Taking this into account, how effective do you think will PM Modi's role be in leading the BJP into the elections?
The Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections are two different things altogether. The same voter becomes another entity during the national election. So, a vote against the BJP now may not be a vote against BJP tomorrow. Having said that, the BJP is unlikely to repeat its 2019 performance where it got 26 of the 28 seats. That was entirely because of how the Congress Party and the JD(S) tried to make a pre-poll arrangement work, and it was just very shabbily managed. The way that tickets were given to the candidates ensured that certain candidates didn't win.
It was really a test case of how a pre-poll alliance is not what you should be going for when you are the key rivals on the ground in the assembly elections. So yes, I don’t think the best of Modi campaigns will ensure a 2019 repeat here. At best, half. Maybe 14-15 seats, perhaps. Not more.
Q: What about the JD(S)? They had an 18 per cent vote share in 2018 and a 20 per cent vote share in 2013. Will they be the kingmaker again, with their 18-20 per cent vote? What if the Congress wins a majority?
The JD(S) has had an 18 percent vote share for a long time now. It’s very clear that the Old Mysore region, which has about 61 seats, has been offering JD(S) almost half of those seats every election. That tells you something about how the voters of that region trust this party to represent them best.
In a big chunk of the Old Mysore region, it’s really the Congress vs the JD(S). And in the rest of the state, it’s the Congress vs the BJP. If the Congress vs BJP happens to become a pan-Karnataka scenario, then we’ll need to wonder how the Congress is likely to fare against one party that they have to face across a bulk of the constituencies.
Q: As per the ABP-Cvoter poll, Congress will win 115 to 127 seats, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will get 68 to 80 seats, and the Janata Dal (Secular) will get 23 to 35 seats. How likely is this scenario? A simple majority for the Congress Party is a very bold prediction. Can the Congress perform this well?
See, those polls were done before the candidates were announced. After the candidates are announced, that’s when the elections really begin. There are 19 Congress rebel candidates who are now fielded by the JD(S), 14 from BJP. JD(S) does not have that problem, as there are only two of them. Having said that, the rebel candidates are contesting on the JD(S) ticket. Most people think that will add six or seven seats for the JD(S) in the northern Karnataka region.
The rebel candidates also indicate that the party may not have been most discerning when it came to ticket allocation, and this can be attributed to the two top leaders of the party, DK Shivakumar and Siddharamaiah, who have differences regarding which candidate should be given the ticket, and there have been ways in which the party has tried to accommodate both of the candidates.
So I think the Congress, which may actually have cruised to a comfortable majority, will now be teetering at a simple majority.
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