It is now almost exactly six months since Siddaramaiah was elected chief minister of Karnataka. What has he achieved?
First, the good news. Politically, things are - relatively - better for the Congress than the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Congress has won two important by-elections three months ago, on top of their Assembly victory: Bangalore Rural and Mandya where the Janata Dal (Secular) was comprehensively defeated. For JD (S) leader Kumaraswamy, the son of H D Deve Gowda who owns and runs the JD (S), this is a defeat twice over: his wife Anitha couldn't win the Channapatna seat; and now she's lost rural Bangalore as well.
By contrast, the BJP is unable to make B S Yeddyurappa see things from their point of view. He continues to refuse to merge his party with the Congress and appears to be adamant on a seat alliance. In the BJP, Anantha Kumar and L K Advani are still opposed to getting Yeddyurappa back, although admittedly that their objections count for far less now than before. Whatever the deal with Yeddyurapa eventually, today the Lingayats, one of the most important castes in Karnataka, are not with the BJP in the same way as they were earlier. Internally, the two most important BJP leaders - Jagadish Shettar and Anantha Kumar - are still squabbling. The BJP in Karnataka is clinging to Narendra Modi like a drowning man clings to straw. This is largely because in the BJP, no one has anything to say about Karnataka.
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First his antecedents. Siddaramaiah is a relatively new entrant to the Congress, having left JD (S) in 2005. Gowda was extremely fond of this maverick politician and brilliant speaker. While he made him deputy chief minister, he refused to make him chief minister - not unnaturally, preferring his son for the job. Siddaramaiah walked out of the JD (S) to be welcomed into the Congress along with a handful of MLAs, all of whom had to be accommodated in subsequent elections. It is on the strength of these MLAs that he claimed the support of "all 121 members of the Congress legislature party" after the Assembly elections earlier this year.
But it wasn't just the 121 who catapulted the Congress to victory. It was also Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) Chief G Parameshwara, who helped his party win but lost his own seat. At one stage hoping to become chief minister, Parameshwara, who is from the scheduled caste and is popular, saw his hopes fall with a thud. Since then there is pronounced, at times public, tension between the two leaders. Whether it is a bill against superstition (like Maharashtra, Karnataka wants its own bill: but the Congress is ambivalent about it, not clear how superstition should be defined and afraid that the Hindus might construe this as interference in religious practices); or the proposal to create a coordination committee between the party and the government, like the core committee at the Centre, it is clear that the chief minister and the PCC chief are not rowing in the same boat. It took four months to set up a coordination committee. And when it was set up, one of Siddaramaiah's biggest detractors, D K Shivakumar, who could not make it to the Cabinet, was accommodated in this committee. Shivakumar was nominated by the party (read Parameshwara) while Home Minister K J George was recommended by the chief minister who tried to stall Shivakumar's elevation as hard as he could.
Add to that the delight of the BJP at the barely-veiled minority appeasement, as the party calls it. The chief minister recently announced a scheme of Rs 50,000 cash grants for the marriage of poor Muslim girls: not a grant for entrepreneurship, jobs, not even for agriculture but for marriage! A total of Rs 10 crore has been put aside for the scheme for the marriage of girls whose total family income is below Rs 1.5 lakh per annum. It is not clear whether just one girl per family will get the money or more than one.
And leaving no room for imagination, Parameshwara observed last month at a public function that it was okay for minorities to take government loans and not return the money. "The Karnataka Minorities Development Corporation, instead of giving small loans, should sanction huge amounts like Rs 50 lakh. Never mind if the beneficiaries don't repay the loans. Topi hakidre parvagilla (colloquial for "no problem if they cheat"). Many people and officials have duped government agencies of several thousands of crores of rupees. It's part of the development process," he said.
In the circumstances, one view could be that if other leaders and ministers in the government are quiet and inarticulate, still coming to grips with their work, it is all for the best.
The fact is, the new Congress government has not shown that it can administer Karnataka. If it is running the government, it is doing so, almost invisibly - which probably prompted the chief minister to direct his council of ministers to stay in their offices at least four days in a week so that people can meet them.
What the government seems to need is an NAC-type organisation. Basically, somebody has to do some thinking in Karnataka.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper