Hegde Finds An Issue Gowda

But Hegde has not done anything much out of tune. For years, Indian politics has largely meant tailoring a fight with the rival individual in mind, rather than the issue in mind. The contours of the duel were decided in 1985, but particularly since 1994, Hegdes actions have been prompted by a missionary zeal to hit at Gowda (the same holds true for Gowda too). And for the first time since 1994, when Gowda outmanoeuvred him in the race for the Karnataka chief ministership, Hegde sees himself in a position to wield the stick. With a debilitated Janata Dal at the national level and in the state (Hegde himself has contributed to it by engineering defections), he clearly sees himself in a far better position to exploit the post-election stakes than Gowda in the Janata Dal.

In the last decade, Hegde has often figured in talk about prime ministerial candidates. But today he can be sure nobody will talk about him after the Lok Sabha elections. He has already accepted the BJPs position of Ab ki baari, Atal Behari (This time it will be Atal Behari Vajpayee), and anyway has few takers in a non-BJP arrangement. There were quite a few friends who tried to dissuade him from joining hands with the BJP. They continue to live in the conviction that his move does not mean that he has diluted his secular credentials even though, for the record, he talks of BJP and its allies like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Shiv Sena in laudatory terms.

Mathura and Kashi are not on the BJPs agenda. The VHP is merely a friendly organisation of the BJP. The Shiv Sena has taken full responsibility for Ayodhya. The Muslims of Mumbai have told me that the state government is not communal in the least, he says with characteristic style. But then, it is his style that separates the 73-year-old Hegde from the rest, a style whose highlights are known to be scotch, Dunhills, light Hindustani music and socialites. A star on the cocktail circuits, Hegde has also proved the dictum in Indian politics that to be a neta (leader), you also have to be an abhineta (actor). He played the role of a politician in the Kannada film Prajashakti.

For a staunch follower of S Nijalingappa and one who was considered The Other Mr Clean after Rajiv Gandhi, why has Hegde failed to tick when lesser politicians and even those he groomed have moved on in life and politics? Says a long-time Hegde watcher: In retrospect, it is clear that his rise as a leader also carried the seed of his ultimate downfall, rather his downgrading. His followers lacked his sense of loyalty, both to persons and policies. Nor did his followers fancy his ideals much. He was fast outmanoeuvred, and he did not learn a vital lesson from Nijalingappa who, when faced with a similar prospect, simply withdrew from active politics. Not Hegde. He has decided to fight, and it is this fight that has ultimately brought him to the BJP.

Hegde does not seem overly worried that he has rather remote chances of taking over as the next prime minister. For him, that is a small sacrifice for sweet revenge in the bigger game of Karnataka politics. Hegde has been locked in the feud with Gowda, his irrigation minister in 1985-86, when he investigated charges of corruption against him. Hegde continues to straddle state politics even in the face of increasing irrelevance at the national level. In the last one month, he has shaken the J H Patel government by winning over important functionaries to his Lok Shakti. His enviable position of being the undisputed leader of the Lingayats even though he is a Brahmin by birth has not dimmed over the years. Today, the idea is clearly to fix Gowda from Delhi by joining hands with the BJP. However, his clout in the BJP-led arrangement will depend on the number of seats he wins, or helps the BJP win in Karnataka. The message is clear: he is not one to go down quietly.

In the process, the BJP has secured a welcome certificate from Hegde, for whom alls fair in the slugfest against Gowda. Secularism is a relative term. Today, no party is cent per cent secular or cent per cent communal. If Namboodiripad could say that the Muslim League is not communal, then how can you call any other party communal, he asks.

Even when he was the Janata Partys spokesman in 1977, Hegde was associated with value-based politics, much before the term entered politalk in the late eighties and nineties. An early federalist, he also challenged the centralisation of fiscal powers by the union government. But for Gowda, he would have been the right kind of person in the United Front government. The day after Gowda won the confidence vote in the Lok Sabha in June 1996, he had Hegde expelled from a party with which he was closely associated from early on. If the last round went to Gowda, Hegde has placed himself in a vantage position for the next round: the Lok Sabha elections.