South halts Hindutva march

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

A determined bid by the Bharatiya Janata Party to seize power in Karnataka was blocked by the opposition last week, aided by judicial intervention, putting paid to Hindutva’s plan to extend its foothold to the South, at least for the time being.

Although the BJP has outgrown its northern base and spread across the country, the South remains inhospitable to it. The party views Karnataka, where it came to power once before, as its gateway to the South.

The Congress was in power in the state during the last five years, and since every election in the state in the recent past has led to change of government, the BJP believed it could take the state.

BJP President Amit Shah, who is reputedly a master strategist, began working on plans to storm Karnataka six months ago. Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the party’s campaign. It drafted also the services of a host of Central ministers and state chief ministers. Its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, deployed its cadres for booth-level activity.

With an eye on the powerful Lingayat community, the BJP projected BS Yeddyurappa as its chief ministerial candidate even though he had attracted corruption charges when he held the post last time. 

The Congress party’s campaign was led by its president, Rahul Gandhi, who, as is his wont, incorporated temple visits in his tour. Hoping to wean away a section of the Lingayats from the BJP, the outgoing Congress government endorsed the demand for recognition of the community as a separate religious group. The tactic did not hurt Yeddyurappa, who had personally backed that demand at one time.

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah’s strategy probably harmed the Congress further by precipitating consolidation of the Vokkaliga community, the Lingayats’ traditional rivals in caste politics, behind the Janata Dal (Secular), led by former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda and his son and former Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy. 

When counting of votes began last Tuesday, the BJP established an early lead and appeared well set to win a majority in the new Assembly. But it ended up with only 103 seats, nine short of an absolute majority.

However, the BJP was the only party to increase its strength. It now had 63 seats more than in the last Assembly. The Congress won 78 seats, 44 less than last time, and the JD(S) 37, three less than last time.

When it became clear that the BJP will fall short of a majority, the Congress offered unconditional support to a government headed by Kumaraswamy of the JD(S). The two parties conveyed to Governor Vaijubhai Vala their decision to work together. The BJP, as the largest single party, also staked a claim to form the government.

With a combined strength of 115, the JD(S)-Congress alliance had a clear majority. Yet Vala, an old RSS hand who was Modi’s Cabinet colleague in Gujarat, rejected their claim and appointed Yeddyurappa as the Chief Minister. He gave him a fortnight to prove majority in the house.

Since there were not enough small parties and independents with whose support the BJP could cobble up a majority, Vala’s action amounted to giving the party an opportunity to poach members from the Congress and the JD(S). 

The two parties jointly approached the Supreme Court against Vala’s partisan decision. At an urgent hearing, the court sidestepped the legal and constitutional issues raised by the petitioners and ordered that the majority be tested on the floor of the house the very next day.

The Governor’s choice of a former BJP Speaker with an unsavoury record to conduct the assembly proceedings raised fears of possible mischief. However, the court’s directives to hold a secret ballot and telecast the proceedings live limited the scope for motivated manoeuvres. 

Even as the MLAs gathered for the session, the Congress released five tapes of conversations in which BJP leaders offered inducements to its members.

Realising that the game was up, Yeddyurappa resigned without facing the floor test. The Governor later invited Kumaraswamy to form the government.

Making sense of a fractured electoral verdict is not easy. There is merit in the BJP’s argument that the electoral verdict was against the Congress. But its own claim of a mandate is questionable. The Election Commission’s figures show that the Congress (38.0%) got more votes than the BJP (36.2%).

With a combined vote share of 56.4% the Congress-JD(S) alliance can legitimately claim popular support. But these parties have a history of rivalry and it remains to be seen if they can pull together for long. 

The most important lesson of the Karnataka experience is that secular parties can halt Hindutva advance if they combine forces. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, May 22, 2018

Democracy disgraced

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Karnataka will need a long time to live down the disgrace of the past fortnight which ended with the state’s Bharatiya Janata Party government overcoming the combined onslaught by a group of dissidents and the opposition.

The BJP, which previously shared power with former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal faction, had begun its solitary reign two years ago with a minority government headed by BS Yeddyurappa. It soon mobilised majority support in the State Assembly.

Ideology played no part in the transformation of the minority into majority. However, in a concession to democratic niceties, the BJP got the eight opposition members who switched sides to resign and seek re-election. Seven of them got re-elected.

Yeddyurappa ran into trouble when he reconstituted the council of ministers. Sixteen legislators — 11 BJP members and five Independents who were associate members of the BJP legislature party — revolted. To ward off pressure to return to the fold, they spent time in the neighbouring states.

As doubts arose about the support the government commanded in the Assembly, Governor HR Bhardwaj asked Yeddyurappa to seek a vote of confidence. The BJP petitioned Speaker KG Bopaiah to disqualify the rebels under the anti-defection law.

Bhardwaj, who was until recently an active Congress politician, asked the Speaker not to change the configuration of the house before the confidence vote. Bopaiah ignored the advice, disqualified all 16 rebels and posted policemen in uniform to prevent them from entering the house to vote. He declared the motion carried on a voice vote.

Refusing to accept the vote, the governor dashed off a report to the Centre recommending dismissal of the Yeddyurappa government and imposition of president’s rule. The disqualified legislators challenged the Speaker’s action in the high court.

As the Centre was unwilling to act on his recommendation, the Governor tried a new tack. He asked the chief minister to seek a fresh vote. Since the high court, while admitting the rebels’ petitions, declined their plea for an interim stay of the Speaker’s order, the BJP knew it could win even if there was a division in the house.

Yeddyurappa faced the Assembly again. The effective strength of the 224-member house had been reduced to 206 in the absence of the 16 disqualified members and two others, one belonging to the BJP and the other to the opposition Janata Dal. The house passed the confidence motion by 106 votes against 100.

Defection and horse-trading are not new phenomena but they manifested themselves in Karnataka this time on a scale unprecedented in the history of Indian democracy. Operators on both sides of the political divide reportedly offered huge sums to secure the support of legislators.

None of the participants in the political drama can look back on the events of the fortnight with any sense of pride. Yeddyurappa, never an inspiring figure, stands exposed as an ineffective chief minister. The failed coup has not enhanced the credibility of Janata Dal (S) leader HD Kumaraswamy, who played a key role in the attempt to topple the government.

The Speaker played a partisan role. The Independents whom he branded as defectors were not members of the ruling party. Their status as “associate members” does not have legal sanction.

The governor’s conduct leaves him too open to the charge of political partisanship. His constitutional authority does not give him the right to direct the Speaker or even advise him on how to exercise his power.

Each of these protagonists can claim with some justification that his motive was good and that of the others was not. However, good intentions and bad methods do not go well together. Good democracy is made up of good practices.

Yeddyurappa cannot breathe easy yet. The high court has stated that the outcome of the confidence vote is subject to its verdict in the petitions filed by the disqualified legislators. If the court quashes the Speaker’s disqualification order, the validity of the confident vote will be called into question.

The chief minister probably faces a greater challenge from inside his party than from outside. There is pressure on him to rein in his cabinet colleagues, Janardhana Reddy and Karunakara Reddy, of Bellary, alleged kingpins of the flourishing illegal mining business.

The Bellary brothers, as they are known, are too powerful to be trifled with. They are not willing to fade away. In fact, they want one of them to made deputy chief minister. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 18, 2010.

Indian Christians- A community In turmoil

Steven L. D’ Souza, a 46-year-old voluntarily retired Indian civil servant and member of various peace keeping initiatives, makes an agonizing appraisal of the situation of the Indian Christians in a long article, distributed by Countercurrents.org.

The article is in three parts -- a brief introduction to the Indian Christian community in a wide historical context, an accounnt of the recent attacks on Christians in Orissa and several BJP-ruled States and analysis of the legal issues in the light of Supreme Court decisions.

The article, titled "Indian Christians -- a community in turmoil" can be accessed here.

Bharatiya Janata Party achieves a breakthrough in the South

FOR several decades, the Bharatiya Janata Party has been the Congress party’s major challenger for power in India. However, its credentials for acceptance as a truly national party remained suspect for two reasons. One, it did not command much influence south of the Vindhyas. Two, it opted to remain an essentially Hindu party. With the disappearance of the obstacles to B. S. Yeddyurappa’s elevation as Karnataka’s Chief Minister, it is all set to break through the first barrier.


In the first general elections after Independence several Hindutva outfits were in the arena. The most prominent among them was the Hindu Mahasabha, which now describes itself as a religious and cultural body, but had been active in electoral politics in the pre-Independence days. In fact, it even shared power with the All India Muslim League for a while.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who had expounded the Hindutva philosophy and was the President of the Hindu Mahasabha for years, was still around at the time of the 1952 elections. But he was under a shadow, having been arraigned in the Gandhi murder case as a conspirator. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, floated in 1951 by Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, a former Mahasabha leader and minister in Jawaharlal Nehru's government, eclipsed the rest and emerged as the main instrument of Hindu politics.


On the eve of the 1977 elections, the BJS merged in the Janata Party, which was put together with Jayaprakash Narayan’s blessings, to take on the Congress. When the Hindutva elements came out of the Janata Party to work under the banner of Bharatiya Janata Party some who had been part of other streams like Sikander Bhakt, Yashwant Sinha and Sushama Swaraj also joined them.


The BJP, like the BJS, was at loggerheads with the secular parties. It branded them pseudo-secular and accused them of appeasing the minorities, especially the Muslims. On their part, the secular parties were reluctant to have any truck with it. Two factors helped the BJP to overcome this disability. One was the respectability the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the spearhead of the Hindutva movement, had acquired as a result of its association with JP and his associates before and during the Emergency. The other was the willingness of even the Left parties to collaborate with it to keep the Congress out of power. The V. P. Singh government was sustained by the support it received from both the Left and the BJP. Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet and BJP President, L. K. Advani were members of an informal coordination committee that met once a week in Singh’s residence.

A.B.VAJPAYEE

In the 1980s, the BJP increased its religious support base by championing the cause of constructing a temple at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. On December 6, 1992 RSS volunteers demolished the mosque. By the mid-1990s the BJP emerged as the ruling party in several States and the likely alternative to the Congress at the national level. As elections threw up a hung parliament, making it difficult to form a stable government, parties which did not want to be seen in its company until then started softening their stand. In 1996 the BJP was able to put together a coalition government at the Centre with A. B. Vajpayee as the Prime Minister. It, however, lasted only 13 days. In 1998 Vajpayee became the Prime Minister a second time. This time the government lasted 13 months. In the elections of 1999, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance secured a comfortable majority and Vajpayee became the Prime Minister once again. This time the government served a full five-year term. Vajpayee’s affable personality, which earned the party friends across the political spectrum, played a part in the BJP’s ability to form and hold together a coalition of two dozen parties.

E. V. RAMASWAMI

In the south, the BJP was able to find allies like Telugu Desam and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. It could also develop pockets of influence in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. However, it could not make headway in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Clearly the Hindutva image posed a major problem for it in these States because of the lingering impact of the anti-caste movements of Periyar E. V. Ramaswami and Sree Narayana Guru.

NARAYANA GURU

In the 2004 elections, the BJP emerged as the largest party in the Karnataka Assembly with 79 of the 224 seats. The Congress came next with 65, followed by the Janata Dal (S) with 58. The Congress and the JD (S) came together with a view to keeping the BJP out of power. Dharam Singh of the Congress became the Chief Minister and Siddaramaiah of the JD (S) the Deputy Chief Minister. Early last year JD (S) President and former Prime Minister H. D. Deve Gowda’s son, H. D. Kumaraswamy, struck a deal with the BJP to share power for the remaining term of the Assembly. Kumaraswamy was to be the Chief Minister for 20 months and Yeddyurappa for the next 20 months. When the time for handover came, Kumaraswamy reneged, hoping the Congress would help him to stay on so as to keep the BJP out. However, the party found it necessary to honour the commitment to the BJP in order to avert a split in its ranks.

Will the BJP be able to get rid of the other blot on its credentials as a national party, namely its pandering to communalism? It is not the first or only party to have played the communal card to gain support. However, democratic decency demands that a party in power must rise above such narrow loyalties. M. A. Jinnah, after achieving the goal of Pakistan, had called for a secular democratic polity. Of course, the effort came too late and failed. The BJP leaders do not have the courage even to try.

B.S.YEDDYURAPPA

Until recently the Karnataka BJP leader used to write his name as Yediyurappa. The chief ministership, which he almost lost, comes to him after he changed the spelling to Yeddyurappa last month, reportedly on astrological advice. J. Jayalalithaa had added the last 'a' to her name under similar circumstances. How come an Indian politician’s fate depends upon how he writes his name in English?