Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, May 13: Though it is too early to speculate on the political trend when the Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks a third straight term next year, the outcome of the Karnataka Assembly elections may have set the tone for national politics in the run-up to the 2024 Parliamentary elections, many experts believe.
The Congress has defeated the BJP in two states in a span of five months Himachal Pradesh and now Karnataka, and later this year will be looking for defending its powers in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh besides trying to snatch back Madhya Pradesh which the party had won in the 2018 elections but conceded to the BJP due to large scale defections from the party rank led by Jyotiraditya Scindia, now a union minister.
In Karnataka, the Congress effectively tackled the BJP framework of politics which is a combination of welfarism, caste representation and Hindutva. Welfare promises of the Congress were closer to people’s lives compared to the religious politics the BJP unleashed over the Congress party’s election manifesto promising ban on suspected communal organisations, including Bajrang Dal. Modi’s efforts to blur the differences between Bajrang Dal and “Bajrangbali,” the term used for Lord Hanuman who is believed to be hailing from Karnataka, apparently was rejected by the people of the state.
Karnataka has also hinted that the over-centralisation in the BJP may not work beyond the Vindhya and if the BJP sidelines and humiliates regional and sub-regional identities, and promoted only the meta-Hindutva identity at their expense, it might prove to be counterproductive. There is a clear indication that Hindutva has not worked. In contrast, the Congress’s decentralised campaign and respect for local identity and local leaders paid them huge dividends. In contrast, the BJP’s over-dependence on its only charismatic leader hiding the local leaders may also be working against the interest of the party in the Assembly elections at least. If the BJP was really trying to reinvent itself, it should have found a dynamic leader to inspire not only the party but also the state administration instead of bringing in Basavraj Bommai, whose heading the state government was a lacklustre period after the party high command decided to sideline the all-important Lingayat leader BS Yeddiruappa on grounds of advanced age.
The BJP tried to expand its social base among various castes and may have succeeded to some extent, but the Congress still could outsmart it. The Congress did not shy away from questioning exclusions based on both caste and religion, and was rewarded for it. The BJP’s model of caste inclusiveness and religious exclusiveness faced a major setback.
Apparently Rahul Gandhi’s “Bharat Jodo Yatra” which spend a considerable time in Karnataka late last year, had stirred up the party in Karnataka, and the momentum was sustained into the election. Congress electing a son of the soil, Mallikarjun Kharge as the national president is also believed to have made important contributions in changing the electoral fortune of the party which was tasting a series of defeats at the hustings lately.
For the Congress, the question is whether it can replicate the same dynamics in terms of leadership, ideological framework and coordination between State and national leadership in the forthcoming Assembly elections and sustain it through the Parliamentary elections. The outcome in Karnataka will potentially quell rebellions in the Congress units of Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, and encourage dissidence in BJP units, particularly in Rajasthan where former Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje wants to be announced as the CM candidate.
The BJP will have to decide whether it will encourage State leaders to take charge at least in Assembly elections or keep all campaigns dependent on Modi’s charisma and whirlwind tours. This is also connected with linguistic minorities. This was the second high pitched campaign that it loses among them. In 2021 it lost West Bengal in a comparable manner and the Karnataka outcome has defined the saffron party as a force in the Hindi heartland slowly losing its grips in south and east, barring the north-eastern states.
Though the Assembly elections are no indicator of how the voters would behave in Lok Sabha polls, the Congress was wiped out in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections barely six months after it won the Assembly elections in three states, the Karnataka outcome would at least provide a better bargaining power to the Congress making all the smaller regional parties to realise that an united opposition against the BJP would never be possible without the Congress in it.
