By-poll test could decide Congress fate in 2018

The Siddaramaiah government in the state has completed four years

In April, Karnataka will see by-elections to two Assembly seats — Gundlupet and Chamarajanagar. Both seats were represented by the Congress in the last elections and have fallen vacant — Gundlupet due to the death of former minister Mahadeva Prasad, and Chamarajanagar after minister Srinivasa Prasad, a close confidante of chief minister Siddaramaiah, fell out with him, quit the Congress and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 

This election battle sets the stage for 2018 when the state goes to the polls. The chief minister will also face a trial in his backyard: Where the two constituencies fall could decide whether he would lead the Congress for the second time in a row. 

While he has retained power for four years, it has not been an easy ride as dissidence often erupted, with several senior leaders staking claim to his chair. Former chief minister S M Krishna quit the party, while Prasad joined the BJP. The blessings of Congress President Sonia Gandhi have so far ensured that Siddaramaiah continued to retain power despite the odds he faced.

The gap between promise and delivery of governance by the Congress government has been growing in the last four years. The electorate voted for Siddaramaiah, a backward class leader, to power on the promise of good governance.

“This has been a government that is drifting since it came to power. It won on a negative mandate — of people’s dissatisfaction with the BJP government before,” says Sandeep Shastri, political scientist and pro-vice-chancellor at the Jain University. “Over time, it has not done anything substantial or positive.” 

“In the last four years, there has been open display of disunity,” he said. “The party is going in one direction, the government in another.” 

Aware of the discontent, Siddaramaiah is making a last-ditch attempt at a makeover. Earlier this week, he launched a web portal, Pratibimba (reflection), that provides a dashboard of the schemes the government has delivered vis-à-vis its promises. Only two thirds of the promises have been met and there is still a year to go before the Assembly elections. 

Dinesh Gundu Rao, working president of the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee, is confident that the party will return to power.

“Definitely, we are in a strong position to win again in Karnataka,” Rao says. “We have seen no scandals; not one minister has been under a cloud for corruption in the last four years. We are a scandal-free government.”

But Opposition parties are up in arms. Both the BJP and the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) have begun the ground work to make a dent in the last big state ruled by the Congress. 

The BJP is holding street protests and raking up issues across the state against the Siddaramaiah government. It has already staked claim to the success of active citizens, who forced Siddaramaiah to scrap a controversial steel flyover that would have cut through the heart of Bengaluru. The move that would have uprooted more than 800 trees caused massive outrage from citizens, who organised peaceful protests on the streets. 

The BJP has also petitioned the Election Commission to direct Siddaramaiah against offering sops in his last Budget lest it has an influence on the electorate in the by-polls. 

A year ahead of the polls, the BJP continues to be a fractured house. Former chief minister B S Yeddyurappa, who is leading the party’s campaign, has been at loggerheads with his colleague K S Eshwarappa. The disunity has been so visible that the central leadership had to intervene to calm tempers, even as the party carries its past baggage of leading a regime riddled with corruption. Yeddyurappa was discharged by the Karnataka High Court last year on technical grounds in a case of illegally denotifying land in Bengaluru. 

The charge had forced him to quit as chief minister. Subsequent investigations and uncertainty in the courts chastened Yeddyurappa. He has now promised better governance if the party returned to power in the state.  

Despite being the only mass leader for the BJP in Karnataka, the Lingayat strongman has to depend on the charisma of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make an impression. Modi will have the twin challenge of ensuring victory for the party in Karnataka and his home state Gujarat in the next round of Assembly elections.

“The BJP has collapsed due to its contradictions,” Shastri says. “It is only the goodwill of the government in Delhi that could bail it out in the states.” 

The JD-S, the regional party headed by former prime minister H D Deve Gowda, is looking for an opportunity in the situation the Congress and the BJP are faced with. JD-S has already invoked passions among 100,000 drivers aligned with taxi apps such as Ola and Uber, who are seeing their earnings fall due to pressure on the companies to turn profitable. The JD-S has blamed the government for indifference towards the drivers, who have migrated to Bengaluru from the party’s traditional stronghold in Ramanagara, Mandya and Mysuru.

“There is no difference between the BJP and the Congress,” said H D Kumaraswamy, former chief minister and state president of JD-S. “The BJP started corruption, the Congress has continued with it. The state has only suffered in the last 10 years. There is growing frustration among the people. They want change. We have a chance to offer that.”