Among all Indian states, the BJP faces quite a unique challenge in Karnataka: how to convert its Lok Sabha voters into enthusiastic supporters of its state assembly candidate?
Consider the following: In the five parliamentary elections since 1999, the BJP and its allies have won more than 75 per cent of all Lok Sabha constituencies. In the same period, the BJP has won exactly one-third of state assembly constituencies in the past six assembly elections, including the 2023 polls. The vote share in parliamentary elections is at least 12 per cent higher than the vote share in the assembly elections. While the highest vote share in an assembly election is 36.35 per cent in 2018, the BJP secured 51.38 per cent of the votes in the parliamentary elections the following year.
More critically, the BJP has never secured a simple majority in Karnataka, although it came close in the 2008 assembly elections when it won 110 constituencies and fell short of majority by three. It has also formed governments seven times between 2007 and 2023.
The 2023 assembly results reiterate the challenge that the BJP is facing in Karnataka. Its state leadership, even when augmented by the active participation of national leaders, is unable to win assembly elections.
In other words, in Karnataka, long seen as its gateway to South India, the BJP has consistently underachieved in state elections. A plurality of voters in Karnataka do not consider the BJP untouchable, but not all of them will support its candidate in assembly elections.
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Talent deficit
Two conclusions may be drawn from the data presented above. First, the BJP’s national leadership, from Vajpayee and Advani to Modi and Shah, has enjoyed great credibility among Karnataka’s electorate. Second, the BJP’s state leadership doesn’t appear to possess similar popular support despite claims about state leaders like Yediyurappa and Ananth Kumar, among others. In comparison, Congress or even JD(S) possesses credible leaders and experienced administrators like Siddaramaiah, the former chief minister, and Deve Gowda, the former prime minister. The BJP lacks political or administrative talent.
Even a cursory look at the BJP’s governance record in Karnataka and the corruption charges consistently levied against its governments from 2008 onwards will demonstrate the magnitude of the BJP’s challenge.
Had the BJP matched its parliamentary election performance at the state level, Karnataka should have become as reliable a BJP state as Gujarat or Madhya Pradesh. It appears that the BJP’s national leadership isn’t unaware of the talent deficit in its state leadership. In fact, Yediyurappa being replaced by Basavaraj Bommai in 2021 was a recognition of the need for a new strategy.
The BJP’s national leadership wanted a pliant and efficient chief minister who could implement the party’s populist programmes. Bommai was that urbane, soft and intelligent leader from a major BJP-supporting community, even though he lacked charisma or oratorical skills. He wouldn’t be the dominant presence that Yediyurappa attempted to be and he was also replaceable with another leader of similar stature, which was a motivation to state BJP leaders to keep striving. While Bommai possesses innate intelligence and an understanding of Karnataka that few in the BJP can match, he hasn’t been the bold, hardworking and hands-on chief minister that the BJP needed. Though aware of this reality, the BJP’s central leadership appears to have believed that Modi-Shah could at least temporarily fill the leadership deficit and motivate the Karnataka voters to support BJP.
The stunning and emphatic victory that the Congress has secured exposes the limitations of the BJP’s strategy and highlights the scale of the BJP’s challenge in Karnataka. While it is true that the BJP has built a social coalition with a strong and credible base in Karnataka, the political representation it has from this social coalition lacks politically astuteness and governance skills. To support this claim, we need to consider how the BJP achieved prominence in Karnataka.
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Corruption charges
In addition to its traditional upper-class, ‘upper’-caste urban vote base, which originated from the old Jana Sangh ranks, the BJP in the late 1990s and early 2000s formed a social coalition that encompassed various groups. This coalition included Lingayats, Scheduled Tribes, and OBC groups such as Nayakas and Balijas, as well as touchable Scheduled Caste groups such as Bovis and Lambanis and untouchable ‘left-hand’ castes. Many of these castes had not received adequate representation within either the Congress or Janata Dal, the two dominant political forces in the 1990s.
BJP accommodated and promoted leaders from these above-mentioned groups. Many of these leaders had also entered public life when the mining and real estate sectors had emerged as generators of massive wealth. They had gotten rich very quickly and required political patronage in order to continue with their businesses. Instead of relying on political patrons, these new businessmen entered politics.
While Janardan Reddy, Sriramulu and Katta Subramanya Naidu are among the better-known examples of this new breed of politicians, hundreds of others became politically active in the early 2000s. As a newly emerging political force, BJP offered more opportunities than Congress or JD(S) both of which had built a cadre of grassroots supporters, state and national level leaders. In fact, several leaders from JD(S) and Congress too joined BJP.
It needs to be noted that the typical BJP politician of the past two decades has come from two backgrounds: either from the Sangh Parivar or from the above-mentioned business-politics nexus. As BJP tasted power as part of the JD(S)-BJP coalition government in 2006, BJP politicians of both these backgrounds began to use political power to further their business interests in real estate or mining. A Sangh Parivar background didn’t produce robust public morality or inclusive politics. In fact, public policy largely became an instrument to make private profit. In this sense, corruption is a constitutive dimension of the BJP’s rise to political prominence.
It is no surprise then that the Yediyurappa government faced severe corruption charges within a short span of coming to power in 2008 and such charges have plagued BJP governments for the past 15 years. Moreover, the state’s capacity to create public good has also been severely compromised under BJP governments.
Modi and Shah acknowledged this crisis in BJP by offering more than one-fourth of the tickets to fresh faces. But then winning assembly elections in a deeply politicised and hugely competitive polity like Karnataka isn’t easy. Unless the new candidates had a strong political base, Modi and Shah could not have won elections in their name. Parliamentary representatives work with Modi and therefore, his credibility will matter in Lok Sabha elections.
But Karnataka is not Gujarat and Bangalore is too far away for him to provide oversight on their state-level representatives. There is no other credible BJP leader, who possesses the political astuteness and generosity, administrative acumen and an ascetic attitude towards wealth. Until the party finds better state-level leaders, BJP will continue to struggle in Karnataka.
The author is a social historian and political commentator. He teaches History and Humanities at Krea University. Views expressed are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)