Campaigning in Karnataka had a definite pattern

Campaigning in Karnataka had a definite pattern

By Deepak Parvatiyar

The Marathi translation of this was published in Marathi Daily Pudhari on 12 May 2018

 http://newspaper.pudhari.co.in/viewpage.php?edn=Kolhapur&date=2018-05-12&edid=PUDHARI_KOL&pid=PUDHARI_KOL&pn=8#Article/PUDHARI_KOL_20180512_08_2/446px/1A764FD

No holds barred campaigning that at times stooped to the levels of personal attacks, and the Rs.100 crore legal notice slapped by the incumbent CM, Siddaramaiah on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, were some of the features of the high voltage electioneering in Karnataka that goes to polls on Saturday.

But the unearthing of a Voter ID card scam towards the end of the electioneering would remembered more in Karnataka. The seizure of nearly 10,000 voter ID cards from an apartment in Bengaluru’s Jalahari area is a pointer to the efforts of political parties to rig the elections. These ID cards were purchased from poor voters, so that they could not cast their votes in elections. This clearly was a novel way of influencing votes and while both the BJP and the  Congress now trade charges against each other over this, the police has registered a criminal case against  14 persons including Congress sitting MLA and RR Nagar candidate N Munirathna. The question though is whether this is just the tip of an iceberg?

Consider that at a time when physical booth capturing has become passé,  political parties are busy trying to explore other avenues of profiteering in elections. Often they try to find fault with the EVMs but without much success; They continue to lure voters – this time too police did recover cash and liquor worth crores in Karnataka!

Besides, missing voters’ list too is much common.  Now the seizure of Voter’s I Card is yet another pointer to the fact that how riggers are finding novel ways to fix elections.  During the 2014 Lok Sabha the BJP had raised the issue of  ‘Silent booth capturing’ in West Bengal and UP. The BJP, then in Opposition, had  then claimed that the modus operandi was to threaten and turn away the agents of Oppositon parties from booths by “using”  the Central forces for ‘non-election purposes’, so that the local police and home guards could “manage” managing polling booths.

All  political parties had a distinct canvassing pattern in Karnataka. While the Janata Dal (Secular), a smaller regional outfit, focused more on door to door campaigning in its pocket Burroughs, both the major parties, the Congress and the BJP got engaged in a bitter war of words against each other. BJP led by Modi directly targeted Siddaramaiah and tried to corner him over corruption – a clever ploy to explore the anti-incumbency factor at a time when Karnataka’s economy is strong. The Congress gave Siddaramaiah a free hand in campaigning realizing that he is the first chief minister of Karnataka since D Devraj Urs to have completed his full term in the office. Urs  (1972-77)had achieved this feet about fourty years ago !

Aware of his star value, Siddaramaiah did play his cards aggressively and like the Rashtriya Janata Dal supremo Yadav before him in Bihar that had fetched the RJD rich dividends in the Bihar elections in 2015, succeeded in making his campaign a PM versus the CM affair and playing the victim card. At the same time, he missed no opportunity to play up the regional card  with his demand for a state flag, and his anti-Hindi barbs. Already he had done some social engineering by initiating a move to accord the religious minority status to the politically powerful Lingayat community to which the BJP’s CM aspirant Yeddyurappa belongs. To the credit of the Congress, the party gave a free hand to Siddaramaiah. The Congress president Rahul Gandhi,  who too campaigned extensively in the state, studiously provided the required support to Siddaramaiah.

In the caste-ridden fabric of Karnataka, where community leaders are the powerful satraps, the BJP much from its party president and CM candidate Yeddyurappa, an influential Lingayat leader whose departure from the BJP had caused the Lotus much damage in 2013 state elections. Besides, during the campaign, the BJP did make significant overtures to former prime minister H.D.Deve Gowda, the JD(S) patriarch and a powerful leader of the other influential community, Vokkaliga. So much so that Siddaramaiah missed no opportunity to brand JD(S) as the BJP’s ‘B’ team, much to the dismay of Gowda.

Yet, there was another very significant aspect of campaigning that could be a decider for the BJP. The party worked aggressively to rake up the issue of drought and farmers’ distress particularly in north and north east Karnataka which is a Congress stronghold. The BJP realizes that if at all it had a chance to raise its numbers, it is in this region. All its top campaigners including Modi have campaigned aggressively here. This explains the selection of Vijayapura, a drought affected town of North Karnataka, as the only venue where former Congress president Sonia Gandhi addressed her first election rally in two years, and attacked Modi by saying that “Speeches cannot fill empty stomachs, food is needed for that”. As if to neutralize the Sonia impact, even Modi had reached Bijapur on the same day to address a rally.  Vijayapura, though, had another significance too—it is from here that the Lingayat movement had started and which is a key issue in the elections this time. While the Congress hopes to cash in on its move to accord the religious minority status to the Lingayats, Modi did try to neutralize this in Vijayapura by accusing the opposition of “trying to divide the community on the basis of caste and religion”.

The presence of Sonia and Modi at Vijayapura on the same day did prove the point that North Karnataka does hold the key for both the Congress and the BJP  in this election.