On the face of it, on the chessboard called Karnataka politics, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Congress are the main contestants in assembly elections due in May, with BJP defending its four-year-old government now headed by Basavaraj Bommai. But scratch the surface, and you will find one of India's worst-kept electoral secrets, that is, the see-saw struggle for upward social mobility between two communities: the Lingayats and the Vokkaligas.
That, of course, is given for seasoned Karnataka watchers. But proof came in abundance last week, if proof was needed, of how both the leading political parties struggle to make or break vote banks out of competing communities, which are among the loudest and the most ambitious in India.
In Karnataka's strange melange of caste and community dynamics, the seemingly authoritarian stronghold of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Hindutva factor championed by the BJP, the organisational chutzpah of home minister Amit Shah - all fall flat.