The Janata Dal (Secular) is grappling with its future as the party faces a critical juncture. After a poor performance in the assembly polls, the JD(S) formed an alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party for the Lok Sabha elections, a strategy that proved beneficial.
Transitioning from “safe mode” to ensure survival, HD Kumaraswamy is now in “save mode,” attempting to reboot the party’s image following the Prajwal Revanna sex scandal. The row has created an opportunity for Kumaraswamy to strengthen his control over the JD(S) amid the ongoing power tussle within the Gowda family.
In the 2023 assembly polls, JD(S) national president HD Deve Gowda had ruled out any alliance with the BJP, even as his son Kumaraswamy hinted at the possibility. This led to the JD(S) being reduced to 19 seats out of 224.
But the strategy that Kumaraswamy devised with Amit Shah to consolidate the Lingayat votes of the BJP and Vokkaliga votes of the JD(S) for a resounding win seems to have worked like a charm for the National Democratic Alliance in Karnataka.
“I am very happy with the results and our strategy worked well,” said an elated Kumaraswamy, who won his Mandya Lok Sabha seat with over 1.5 lakh votes. The NDA aimed to control the Old Mysore region, traditionally a JD(S) stronghold supported by the Vokkaliga community. Winning at least two out of three seats was crucial for the JD(S) to maintain its political foothold in the region.
Kumaraswamy has called the sex scandal a conspiracy to defame the Deve Gowda family and avoided making statements about the leaked videos to avoid appearing to defend the Revannas. He emphasised the family’s respect for women, citing his father’s untarnished legacy.
A senior JD(S) leader, who wished to remain anonymous, said, “Appa ji (Deve Gowda) has lived an upright life, never allowing a taint on the party’s image. It is a difficult time for the family and even more so for us party workers.”
Kumaraswamy and Revanna, the politician sons of HD Deve Gowda, have persistently vied for control within the JD(S), so much so that the families of both brothers have crossed swords when it came to giving tickets for assembly or parliamentary polls over the years.
The Revanna family, which has strong control over Hassan, now faces a significant challenge to its supremacy, with the sexual abuse scandal tarnishing the Gowda family’s reputation as well as the JD(S)’s image.
While the JD(S) may find some redemption in the seats won by Kumaraswamy in Mandya and the Kolar seat by Mallesh Babu, the Hassan and Mandya Lok Sabha constituencies have always been pivotal to the party’s election strategy.
The JD(S) is still at a critical crossroads. The party finds itself on the backfoot over sexual assault allegations against its leaders HD Revanna and Prajwal Revanna, the son and grandson of party patriarch Deve Gowda. The pen drive controversy pushed the JD(S) into a corner where it is alleged that lakhs of copies of the pen drives were distributed with videos of the victim women just before the Hassan Lok Sabha seat went to polls. Bhavani Revanna, Prajwal’s mother and a JD(S) leader, has also been accused of kidnapping one of the victims of sexual assault and keeping her captive to ensure she did not file an FIR.
HDK’s leadership and win in Mandya were crucial to the party. This is a seat from where his son Nikhil Kumaraswamy lost the 2019 Lok Sabha polls to Sumalatha Ambareesh, the wife of late Kannada actor Ambareesh. She contested after being denied a ticket by the Congress and had the tacit support of the BJP.
Hassan has long been the stronghold of JD(S) patriarch Deve Gowda, who vacated the seat in 2019 for his grandson, Prajwal Revanna. The JD(S) retained the seat with a comfortable majority, signalling a successful transition of power. However, if allegations against Prajwal Revanna in the sex scandal are proven true, it could have significant repercussions for the future of the JD(S).
There have been bitter arguments and fights over the line of succession and how both grandsons, Nikhil Kumaraswamy and Prajwal Revanna, should be given equal political platforms to grow and contest elections.
Kumaraswamy has always wished for his son Nikhil to carry on the Deve Gowda political legacy, while Bhavani Revanna, his sister-in-law, lobbied for her son Prajwal as the successor. Bhavani had made several attempts for a JD(S) ticket since 2013, but Kumaraswamy was seen blocking her candidature. In 2018, the situation escalated when Prajwal was denied the Hunsur ticket for the assembly elections, intensifying the family’s internal conflicts. In 2019, when Nikhil Kumaraswamy was given the Mandya Lok Sabha ticket, all hell broke loose in the family, and pressure mounted on Deve Gowda to also accommodate Prajwal or face the consequences.
Torn between the demands of his sons’ families, Deve Gowda decided to give up his Hassan seat for Prajwal, which the latter won and became a first-time MP.
Rather than defending his brother’s family against the sexual abuse accusations, Kumaraswamy has played a different stroke. He has kept the pressure on the ruling Congress government to conduct a fair probe and redirected his criticism towards those who shared the videos without concealing the identities of the victims.
Now, with the Revanna family entangled in the controversy, Kumaraswamy has stepped in to save the party and family’s image during JD(S)’s final fight for survival. Before the controversy broke out, he would call his family a “united” one, where he appealed for votes for his nephew Prajwal Revanna in Hassan. Soon after, the former CM distanced himself from his own “blood” brother’s family and has been campaigning for the strictest punishment to be awarded to the “perpetrators” (which in this case points towards Prajwal and HD Revanna).
Internally, the JD(S) also faced severe discord over ticket distribution and the alliance with the BJP. But all has now been ironed out with the JD(S) winning two out of three Lok Sabha seats and Kumaraswamy seemingly on his way to being made a union minister.
Kumaraswamy was instrumental in getting the JD(S) to align with the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls after facing a major rout in the 2023 state assembly elections and hopes to tighten his grip on the party reins while leaving no effort to shield his father and JD(S)’s image from the scandal.
Be it in Hassan or elsewhere in Karnataka, analysts say that fingers are pointed towards Prajwal and his father HD Revanna. The sympathy for Deve Gowda and Kumaraswamy has been immense as people feel that the Revanna family single-handedly ruined the reputation built by the former PM over decades in a matter of seconds.
According to political analyst BS Arun, winning even two out of three seats is a huge morale booster for the JD(S).
“After it lost face in the last assembly polls, the Prajwal Revanna sex scandal happened, and this too has proven to be a serious setback for the JD(S). In the backdrop of this, the JD(S) leadership would be quite pleased with their electoral performance in parliamentary polls. Added to this, another family member Dr C N Manjunath, son-in-law to Deve Gowda, winning has given the family the much-needed political push,” he said.
If dousing this fire was not enough, the JD(S) is also fighting another internal battle with its other state unit in Kerala facing a rebellion. In October last year, after a JD(S) legislature party meeting, the state presidents of Karnataka and Kerala, CM Ibrahim and CK Nanu, were unceremoniously ousted from their posts for “anti-party activities” by the senior Gowda.
This was because both leaders had openly criticised the decision taken by Kumaraswamy to ally with the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls, a last-ditch effort by the party to survive. On December 11, Ibrahim created a breakaway faction along with Nanu to call themselves the “real JDS”. In a parallel national plenary session, they passed resolutions removing Deve Gowda from the party’s national presidency, but then things went into cold storage as the senior Gowda took charge of the JD(S) poll strategy and began actively campaigning with ally BJP.