Message from Karnataka

Congress must draw the right lessons from its victory

The Congress triumph over its victory in the Karnataka Assembly elections needs to be tempered by a sobering reality check. The Congress was widely expected to do better in a state that has typically voted out the ruling party for decades and it beat expectations by outperforming most predictions to record its strongest vote share and tally since 1989. It is critical, however, that neither the Congress nor other Opposition parties consider these results a proxy for national trends in the upcoming parliamentary polls in 2024. A cautionary tale lies in the results of the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 for the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, just months after the Congress emerged victorious in the Assembly elections in the three states in 2018. In all three states, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) swept the Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 elections — in Rajasthan, the Congress did not even open its account.

Though the BJP’s performance has been worse than expected, pollsters may need to examine the reasons for its defeat with greater circumspection. The ruling party has been accused of corruption and poor strategy because it alienated the powerful Lingayat community, whose leaders switched to the Congress. But the impact of the latter is unclear, given that heavyweights such as former chief minister Jagadish Shettar lost by a significant margin to the BJP candidate in his pocket borough of Hubli-Dharwad Central, which he had held for six terms. Indeed, disaggregated voting patterns suggest that it is the Janata Dal (Secular), or JD(S), that has been the major loser. The five percentage point vote swing in favour of the Congress from 38 to 43 per cent appears to have come entirely from former prime minister H D Deve Gowda’s party, which saw its vote share drop from 18 to 13 per cent. In contrast, the BJP’s vote share has been steady at about 36 per cent. This suggests that as in West Bengal, elections in the state may have become more of a two-way fight, given the slow fading out of the JD(S), which at one stage enjoyed nearly a quarter of the votes.

The question as to why the JD(S) voter moved to the Congress, and not to the BJP, may demand objective analysis, not least by the Congress itself. If it is to build itself as a credible national Opposition, it is critical it does not make the mistake of ascribing disproportionate credit to the national leadership and Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, the impact of which is decidedly unclear. What seems to have worked is strong local leadership under D K Shivakumar and Siddaramaiah. It is now important for the central leadership to handle state leadership issues with maturity and nous to prevent the kind of debacle that saw Punjab and Madhya Pradesh slip from the party’s grasp. Leadership tussles have been festering in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, two states that are up for Assembly polls later this year, and need to be addressed. But for the BJP, which fought on a coarse communalist platform — removing reservations for Muslims and opposing the hijab for Muslim girl students — the message should be clear. Polarisation may have run its course in the more educated south.