Karnataka and After



Some called it a new leaf in the history book; some alerted the public about the dangerous expansion of Hindutva forces; some attributed it to the decades of constant hard work.

Polemics aside, it cannot be denied that newness has entered Karnataka. BJP, the saffron party, the so called Hindutva Brigade has wrested the power in the state with reasonable success.

Had the elections been held earlier, the numbers would have been larger and the term ‘reasonable’ would have been absent from the above paragraph. But the legacy of the dirty politics institutionalised by Indira Gandhi now played far more crudely by today’s Congress ensured that BJP’s success rate is contained at three seats short of majority. This would mean that though they are in power, their stability would remain somewhat precarious for the whole term.

However the momentum gained in this election and the media’s hyperbole that ‘BJP has stormed beyond the South of the Vindhyas’ is going to play effectively in the minds of the people as well as the party cadres. This means that in the oncoming state elections in November, BJP will be battling with much renewed vigour and Congress with lot more scepticism and bellicosity. The fiendish chapters of Indira Gandhi’s era are already being applied in a coarse form in Rajasthan with Gurjar’s agitation.

Nevertheless, in Karnataka, when the hyperbole-induced rush dies down and the reality stares hard at the government and the people both are going to realise that nothing much is going to change. Karnataka is a curiously complex state that houses some of the economically most progressed societies and also the least progressed. The capital is the home to Infosys and Wipro, the software giants whose combined annual turnover exceeds the GDPs of all of India’s neighbouring countries put together, and some district capitals do not even have covered bus stands.

It is not going to be an easy task for any government to try to achieve this without the support and cooperation of the people. As it stands, the capital dwellers are too busy consuming the resources and crying for more and the peripheral districts are too busy battling over the literary superiority of Kannada over their neighbouring languages, while their farmers are hanging themselves over the bad debts of as little as ten thousand rupees. The government must actively propagate people’s social and civic responsibilities in working on development projects. It is very unlikely that the new government is going to indulge in that. They are going to be too busy basking in the new found glory as the creaking infrastructure quaks under their ground.

As for the Congress, their wily madam’s deceitful arrogance is going to take them down further in the coming elections. Indira’s Congress destroyed the naïve optimism of the post-independence society. Sonia’s Congress is pulling at all the stops to destroy the naïve optimism of the post-reforms society. The Madam is trying to prove her mettle at the game of her Mother-in-law. With the nation staked at the table.