Nonagenarian former Prime Minister, HD Deve Gowda, issued a statement a few days back. It was unlike any that he has issued in his entire political career spanning over sixty years.
It read: “I will be discharging all my parliamentary work and political responsibilities sitting at home for a few more days. I do not want party leaders and workers trooping in to enquire after me. After a few days, I will not only visit the party office, but will participate in all activities like before. I don’t want my party leaders and workers to think otherwise about this request I am making. I have had some health issues and doctors have advised me to rest.”
What preceded this statement is that not just his party leaders and workers, but all top leaders of Karnataka, across party lines, from former Chief Ministers Siddaramaiah to BS Yediyurappa and Basavaraj Bommai had started visiting him at home in the full glare of cameras.
This is because from the end of July Deve Gowda had not been seen in public, his statements had dried up, and his tweeting had become routine and dull. For the first time in his political life, he had missed an entire parliament session.
The Leader Who Oils the Wheel of Politics
Those who know Karnataka politics will vouch as to how terribly unusual this is, simply because Gowda’s political and public engagement has always been extraordinary. For decades, not a day passed without him being there, in some corner of the state or the nation, physically, to comment, protest, make and break governments, demonstrate solidarity, mourn dead colleagues, celebrate events, mark attendance at official dos, or go temple hopping.
He did not know physical exhaustion and his emotional ghosts were exorcised only when he was on the move, in the middle of people.
Gowda was never thought of to be idle, and when he himself felt he was, as his longtime colleague, JH Patel, wittily remarked, he would undo at night all that he had built by day. His breathless political cycle, energy and unwavering focus on the tasks he set for himself always exhausted his colleagues. While they took breaks, he has known no diversion – wine, women, music or movies.
Patel, again, in his inimitable style, once enquired about Gowda’s dreams: “Has a beautiful girl ever appeared in his dreams? Are his dreams only political nightmares?”
When this is the established lore about Gowda, his absence from the public eye for two full months, made everyone so anxious that even his disciple-turned-detractor Siddaramaiah visited his home, after a longtime. When Siddaramaiah had become chief minister in 2013, he had arrogantly refused to pay a courtesy visit to the man who had made him the leader he had become. However, in 2016, when the Cauvery water crisis loomed, he had rushed to see him because only Gowda could signal calm to the people, and simultaneously offer strategy notes to lawyers in the Supreme Court.
Whether one loves Gowda or hates him, there is no denying that he oils the wheels of politics in the state. Therefore, when he went silent for a short period, fellow politicians must have feared that the chariot of democratic activity and noise may suddenly creak to a halt.
They were not being provoked or challenged to prove their existence and they were perhaps unable to figure out the emptiness that was enveloping them. For the longest period, Gowda has constantly triggered debate, dissent, anger, hatred, loyalty, and defection. There is a raw emotional connect every single Karnataka politician, young or old, has with him either from near or far. That is the patriarchal perch that Gowda occupies.
The Ever-Renewing 'Phoenix Moments'
As his biographer, I have asked Gowda a few times as to what really drives him after having seen it all, and having occupied the most powerful chair in the nation? What real incentive is there for him to be so minutely engaged at his age? He would smile each time and say that it was not “a position that interested him but the playground itself.”
He would elaborate the divine scheme: “You may not believe this, but God has kept me in shape because he wants me to execute some plan. If he had no plans, the signal would be clear.” He said this during the 2019 general election, when he was late into his 80s, and when he entered his 90s in May.
The last statement he made in parliament when he was stepping down as prime minister that he “will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes” was not about one particular and spectacular event but was an abiding metaphor that applies to all moments when he made small and big comebacks since 1997. His decennial political obituary has been written from 1978, but he has always risen.
An interviewer asked me when his biography, Furrows in a Field, came out, if it was his ‘phoenix moment,’ when he was being remembered again and his legacy was being evaluated and recorded with some meticulousness. My vanity wanted to say ‘yes,’ but I knew that it clearly wasn’t in Gowda’s mind. He has never liked any kind of finality associated with his ‘phoenix moment.’ What that is, is perhaps not clear to him too, but he enjoys the perennial mystery that it animates inside and outside him.
When he issued the statement asking people not to come to enquire after him recently, he perhaps dictated it with a lot of irritation. He perhaps suspected that those unending visits of political colleagues were creating a pre-mature sense of gloom.
When Karnataka Chief Minister Bommai and his colleagues had lunch sitting around him, holding plates in their hand in foggy light, what it produced was the ambience of da Vinci’s Last Supper. Gowda’s mind’s eye must have seen it and decided to put an end to such a grim frame. That’s how shrewd he can be. Being a firm believer and an adherent of astrological predictions, he perhaps knows that there was more time he has to plough, more history he has to witness, if not help create it.
Time Is Not Yet Up
There are more reasons why Gowda cannot be ignored, and they go beyond his patriarchy and personality. He is the only politician who has marvelously mixed caste identity politics with development ideas. While the Congress offers no reasoning for power except entitlement, and the BJP conjures communal reason, Gowda has always put big ideas before his electorate to seek power.
It is this, even amidst intense competition from national parties, that has ensured that he retained an average 20 percent vote share in Karnataka for the past 23 years.
He built the party he now heads – Janata Dal (Secular), after he stepped down as prime minister. This is a credential no former prime minister in India can claim.
His is also the only regional party that does not harp on mild or strong variations of chauvinism to seek votes. Its vision and worldview have always been wide and universal.
Even as recently as September 2021, Gowda’s son, HD Kumaraswamy put out an elaborate development and welfare plan to seek votes (30-bed hospitals in every gram panchayat, English medium schools for rural students, elaborate economic plan for the farm sector instead of loan waivers, housing schemes etc.). He said, give me power and if I do not implement this, I will dissolve the party and retire from politics. That is the hallmark training and rhetoric that Gowda has imparted to his son and his party.
This has made the political space in the state dynamic and competitive. To provoke and polarise people is easy, but to go before them with ideas is old style, and Gowda represents that old style balance.
Sugata Srinivasaraju is a journalist, author and columnist. He wrote the biography of HD Deve Gowda titled Furrows in a Field (Penguin, Vintage).
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