Karnataka CM under siege from his own Lingayat community, BJP legislators

In the latest phase of his incessant problems, B S Yediyurappa is under siege from his Lingayat community and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislators who belong to influential Lingayat subsects. Their discontent  arises largely from a perception that Lingayat MLAs from the Panchamshali subsect, which dominates north Karnataka, the BJP’s backbone, were “ignored” and inadequately represented in the ministerial council constituted in July last year, when Yediyurappa took over as chief minister for the third time. 

 

The grouse persisted after he expanded the council of ministers for a second time in February this year, principally to accommodate the Congress and JD(S) defectors who shored up his minority government. Ten of the 11 turncoats were inducted, leaving six vacancies in the sanctioned strength of 34 ministers.    

 

Basanagouda Patil Yatnal, Bijapur City MLA, was the latest to revolt. Yatnal, who was a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government, warned the CM that Yediyurappa’s days in office were “numbered” because the BJP “high command” seriously contemplated leadership remake.

 

The views on Yatnal’s dissent varied because he was perceived as a “mercurial” person who had been in and out of parties. The last time when Yatnal left the JD(S) and rejoined the BJP, the party’s veterans Pralhad Joshi, Jagadish Shettar, and D V Sadanand Gowda opposed his re-entry. Yediyurappa cleared the decks under pressure from the Panchamshali Lingayat seers. Yatnal is from the sub-sect.

 

“It was a rare occasion when central leaders backed Yediyurappa on Yatnal’s re-induction because they realised he is an asset,” a Karnataka BJP source said. “He’s a loose cannon who can’t be ignored,” a Bengaluru-based political observer said.

 

Of the 99 Lingayat sub-sects, the weighty groups are the Panchashali, Reddy-Lingayat, Sadarasa, and Banajiga. Yediyurappa comes from the Banajiga faction, which is spread over south Karnataka and rules the roost in the BJP to the chagrin of the denominations from the central and northern parts which vote the BJP with the same fervour as the Banajiga. Right now, the BJP’s sense was although Yatnal was “unlikely” to become the trigger for a more serious rebellion against Yediyurappa, his “moves would be watched carefully”.

 

Yatnal was not the only cause of the pervasive restiveness among north Karnataka’s Lingayats. In January 2020, before the last Cabinet shuffle, Vachananda Swami — pontiff of Davangere’s Veerashiva Lingayat Panchamshali Peetha — created a pressure point for the CM at a public function in which Yediyurappa was present, insisting his follower and Bilgi (Bagalkot) MLA Murugesh Nirani be made a minister. Yediyurappa lost his cool and warned the Swami not to speak in that manner with him. Nirani was not taken in.

 

In February, Deshikendra Swami, custodian of the Srishaila Saranga Math, Kalaburagi, demanded Dattatreya Patil Revoor, Gulbarga South legislator, get a ministry or else he would ask 10 MLAs to quit. Yediyurappa did not yield. The Gulbarga region seats the Reddy-Lingayats who felt they were short-changed by Yediyurappa despite their backing. With half a dozen other Lingayat legislators, Nirani and Revoor formed a pressure group but were ineffective.

 

In Karnataka’s multi-layered politics that often subsumes the BJP’s Hindutva project in the quest for identities based on region and castes, any challenge becomes onerous for the chief minister. Indeed, a BJP source claimed Yatnal’s dissent was also intended to draw the government’s attention to the “disproportionate amounts of money” funnelled into south Karnataka, where the Yediyurappa family constituencies of Shivamoga and Shikaripur fall. 

 

The upcoming Assembly bypolls in Bengaluru’s Raja Rajeshwari (R R) Nagar and Tumakuru’s Sira were projected as another “test” for the CM, although in the past Assembly by-polls fought under his stewardship, the BJP won 12 of the 15 seats.

 

C N Ashwath Narayan, deputy CM who was elected from Bengaluru’s Malleshwaram, said: “We have a near-perfect social engineering model in place at Sira because we won over the Golla (Yadav) caste, and have the Dalits on our side, besides the Lingayat, Brahmin, and Vaish.”

 

Narayan believed the votes of the Vokkaliga, the dominant caste in Sira, would get divided between the BJP, the Congress, and the JD(S).  The BJP’s Mysuru MP, Prathap Simha, who’s minding Sira, said: “Although it’s a bastion of the Congress and the JD(S), we are telling voters neither D K Shivakumar (the Karnataka Congress president) nor JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy could become the CM. A vote for the BJP is the only way to resolve local issues related to irrigation and civic amenities.”

 

In RR Nagar, the BJP put up Congress defector Munirathna Naidu and claimed he was a “sure-shot” winner, although Shivakumar treated it as a contest to save his prestige.

 

On the leadership issue, two opinions — one indeterminate and the other unambiguous — emerged. C T Ravi, BJP national general secretary, said: “Right now, there’s no question of changing the leader.”  Karnik’s take was: “Who has the time to think of leadership issues when we are pre-occupied with bypolls, the elections to the legislative council, and then the gram panchayat polls?” Hard to say if the beleaguered CM is on notice.