Hoping Against Hope

WITH WEEKS TO GO FOR THE MAY 10 POLLS, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi kicked off a fresh round of campaigning in Karnataka where he had made a controversial speech in 2019 that led to his recent disqualification as MP. He tried to keep the focus on local issues, echoing the state Congress’ allegations of 40 per cent “commission raj” against the Basavaraj Bommai gov­ernment. He bought an ice cream from a Nandini store in Bengaluru, calling the brand “the best” and getting a foot in the door of a row involving Amul and the Karnataka Milk Federation after the former announced its plans to distrib­ute its products in Karnataka. “The Karnataka Congress has been consistently taking up local issues to counter BJP’s national narrative. Although Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi are national leaders, they seem to be taking cues from the state leadership to raise issues of local relevance like cor­ruption, misgovernance and Amul-Nandini. The strategy could prove helpful for Congress,” notes Chandan Gowda, a professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru. Local issues are indeed at the heart of the Congress campaign, says Congress MLA and spokesper­son Priyank Kharge. “Unlike BJP leaders who get their or­ders from Delhi and Nagpur, we have complete freedom to decide the course of the campaign in Karnataka,” he tells Open. The party has released a separate manifesto for every region of the state and announced four social “guarantees”—200 units of free power to all households under Gruha Jyoti, a monthly assistance of ` 2,000 to the woman head of every family under Gruha Lakshmi, 10 kg rice free for every BPL household member under the party’s former flagship Anna Bhagya scheme, and a monthly allowance of ` 3,000 for unemployed graduates and ` 1,500 for unemployed diploma holders under Yuva Nidhi.

“I think you will agree that we have upped the ante with our PayCM, Kivi Mele Hoova and police recruitment scam campaigns. You cannot miss them, on the streets and on so­cial media,” Kharge says. “Earlier, BJP was attacking and we were defending. Now the tables have turned. We have forced BJP to respond to every charge of misgovernance and corrup­tion,” he adds. Congress may indeed win the war of words. Take, for instance, the seizure of ` 10.5 lakh in unaccounted cash from a Public Works Department (PWD) engineer at the Vidhana Soudha. BJP was dubbed “Brokers Janata Party” and the seat of the state legislature “Vyapara Soudha”. While there is nothing wrong with picking low-hanging fruit, the opposition has squandered opportunities to launch attacks on BJP. The Panchamsali Lingayats’ demand for a 10 per cent hike in reser­vations, for instance, has only been partly met by the Bommai government’s decision on the eve of polls to move them to a new backward classes category ‘2D’ with their quota enhanced by just 2 per cent. After first failing to call out the decision as a feeble attempt to appease the community, senior Congress leaders, including AICC General Secretary RS Surjewala and Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president DK Shivakumar, have now attacked the ruling party for promis­ing to enhance the quotas for Lingayat, Vokkaliga and SC/ST community members and later backing out in the Supreme Court. In response to writ petitions challenging the new res­ervation policy, the BJP government in Karnataka has said it will not implement it until the court rules on the matter. Former Congress Chief Minister and AHINDA leader Siddaramaiah has meanwhile waded into the Lingayat controversy by saying that a Lingayat chief minister “is the root of all corruption in the state”—a statement instantly interpreted by Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai as being in the same vein as Rahul Gandhi’s defamatory remarks against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

BJP has adopted a man-marking strategy against Congress by fielding senior leaders V Somanna and R Ashoka to take on Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar from Varuna and Kanakapura, respectively. “These constituencies are unshakeable strong­holds for both leaders. This is more about BJP cutting their own leaders to size by challenging them to win the unwinnable than about restricting Congress leaders to their constituen­cies,” says Priyank Kharge. He himself is a marked man, with BJP fielding Manikanth Rathod, a history-sheeter with over 30 criminal cases, against him in Chittapur. “Clearly, they hate me more than they love the people of the state. They have fielded not just a convict but one convicted for stealing milk powder meant for malnourished children in Anganwadis,” Kharge says. Congress will nevertheless have to wrap its head around the cutthroat seat-level strategies of BJP. To its credit, even as BJP seems to be struggling to reconcile the many centres of power within the party, Congress has not allowed its internal strife to eclipse its campaign. Shivakumar’s highhandedness in handing out tickets on the basis of “winnability”, however, has alienated grassroots supporters and aspirants in some constituencies. He is also said to be responsible for denying Siddaramaiah a second ticket from Kolar.

Kharge claims Congress has turned corruption into the main poll issue and forced BJP to speak a more progressive language. “They started out with hijab, halal and other communal narra­tives, all of which failed to take off. As the main opposition party, we played a major role in warning people about BJP’s divisive agenda. When they were busy stirring the communal cauldron, the state was losing investments and job opportunities. Now they have started talking about development, but they don’t have anything to show. Defections, corruption and lack of de­velopment are the biggest issues they are facing now.”

This election, the last one to be fought on the shoulders of a generation of ageing mass leaders, is a gruelling and all-important test for Congress and BJP, both of which are rethink­ing their scripts for Karnataka.

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