Karnataka’s chief minister HD Kumaraswamy is evidently caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Having done some hard bargaining and appropriated the post to head a Congress-JD (Secular) government after the recent assembly elections, he has been balancing conflicting interests and doing a trapeze act for the past couple of months. As HDK admitted recently, his patience level has touched rock bottom. This wail could either be to put the Congress on notice and fetch from it some more leg-space or to give advance notice to his own partymen that the honeymoon with the Congress might end sooner than later. In the minimum, this CM is already cutting a very sorry figure.
Kumaraswamy and his JDS, backed mainly by the Vokkaliga community, came third in the order of assembly strength – the BJP and the Congress taking the first and second places respectively in the new house. The last poll results of May showed support for the JDS in the assembly dwindled substantively and the BJP and the Congress gained from this downslide. The fall in esteem for his party didn’t prevent Kumaraswamy from staking claim for the CM post, knowing full well that the Congress could bend in its bid to outwit the BJP in the post poll power games. A post-poll alliance, as the JDS and the Congress forged, was an acceptable strategy to win power. The CM post going to JD(S) was a standard formula that is noticed in such events.
Now, with a larger number of Congressmen finding a place in the Coalition ministry, these Congress ministers and the party’s state leadership in the state are reportedly creating innumerable problems in the governance. Differences are apparently cropping up at multiple levels on a regular basis. This is probably the main reason why the CM expressed his deep anguish in public.
In the long run, however, this might not be in the interests of the Congress.
Kumaraswamy himself had claimed a month ago that his government will at least survive till the 2019 next general elections. His expression of pain may be due to his slowly dawning comprehension that carrying the dead weight of the Congress for even one year may not be possible. HDK has probably not studied the political history of independent India properly. The starting point for any coalition to be formed with the Congress would be the lesson to be learnt from the events that made Chaudhury Charan Singh the Prime Minister of India in 1979. At that time, the late Sanjay Gandhi and Indira Gandhi were pulling the strings of the Congress. When Charan Singh dissociated himself from the Morarji Desai-led Janata Party government and became Prime Minister himself with a breakaway group which the Congress supported, the undemocratic character of the Congress came to the fore. Overly ambitious Charan fell easy prey to the simple machinations of the Congress. That brought about an untimely death to an important political experiment at the federal level. The second prey to similar game plans was Chandrashekhar drawing support from the Congress for his minority government. Similar examples at the state level also betray the intolerance of the Congress towards smaller or regional groups. This similar attitude can also be perceived within the BJP of today.
Coming back to Karnataka, keeping this alliance alive will be a requirement for the Congress and the Opposition as a whole. For, it was with much fanfare that the anti-BJP Opposition alliance was cobbled after the Karnataka assembly verdict. The word that went around was that if such a unity could be forged at the national level, the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi could be made to bite the dust.
The discord in the slowly building Opposition edifice came out in the open when West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee played partisan politics and took with her two Chief Ministers – Pinarayi Vijayan and Chandrababu Naidu — to provide moral support to CM Arvind Kejriwal when he was on a fast at the Lt Governor’s residence in Delhi. She did so without involving the Congress. It showed the spirit of unity evident in the Bengaluru show — at the swearing in of the JDS-Congress government – probably has not survived.
It is certain that only a united Opposition can effectively take on the BJP at the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. There are growing hints that Modi and the BJP are losing ground. The Congress might not necessarily be the main gainer out of this situation, as its organisational weakness needs no fresh citations. Under the circumstances, if only to prove the viability of a united Opposition build-up, it is imperative that the Karnataka experiment is given a chance for survival.