Prime Minister Narendra Modi and JDS patriarch HD Deve Gowda held a few election rallies together in the Vokkaliga heartland of Old Mysore region in the last one week. The JDS, which has aligned with the BJP to save its fast-depleting turf, had mobilised party cadres to cheer both the leaders.
The 92-year-old Gowda defended Modi government and urged his followers to vote for the alliance to defeat the ruling Congress in Karnataka. Both BJP and JDS claim that the response has been good and the alliance will click.
After the disastrous 20:20 alliance of 2006-07, which propelled BJP to power in Karnataka twice after that, JDS had maintained a distance from the saffron party, calling it communal and unreliable. After PM Modi came to power in 2014, the Gowda clan had mostly attacked him and the RSS, occasionally praising some of his initiatives.
After the near-total rout of the party in last year’s assembly elections, JDS quickly buried the hatchet and clinched a deal with the BJP, agreeing to be its junior partner in the state.
Gowda’s son and former chief minister HD Kumaraswamy led the talks and even agreed to a mere three Lok Sabha seats in the bargain.
The return of Siddaramaiah as chief minister and the raise of their fellow caste leader DK Shivakumar in the ruling Congress forced the JDS to shed its so-called secular credentials and embrace the BJP ahead of Lok Sabha elections.
The Karnataka BJP, which was not so enthusiastic about joining hands with the Gowdas, was told by the party high command to fall in line to prevent fragmentation of anti-Congress votes in the state.
To cement the alliance, the Gowda family agreed to loan their son-in-law and renowned cardiologist Dr CN Manjunath to the BJP as their candidate against Congress’s three-time MP and DK Shivakumar’s younger brother DK Suresh in Bengaluru Rural.
The BJP’s main vote bank is Lingayats, who are traditionally opposed to the Vokkaligas. Vokkaligas are the core voters of the JDS. The coming together of these two most powerful communities in the state is not new. From the 1970s to the late 1990s, Lingayats and Vokkaligas were the backbone of the Janata Parivar against the Congress in Karnataka. After the collapse of Janata Parivar, a large section of the numerically bigger and a pan-Karnataka community Lingayats moved to the BJP, accepting BS Yediyurappa as their new caste leader in politics. Majority Vokkaligas backed Gowda’s party JDS, a breakaway faction of the Janata Dal.
Keeping these historical details in mind, both BJP and JDS think their alliance should work in southern Karnataka.
The BJP-JDS alliance is cleverly exploiting the Vokkaliga community’s dislike for Siddaramaiah on his home turf. They are telling the voters that voting for the Congress will embolden Siddaramaiah further, diminishing the chances of Shivakumar and destroying JDS.
This seems to be working on the ground, making the job of Shivakumar difficult. In last year’s assembly elections, the Vokkaliga heartland had voted decisively for the Congress, hoping that Shivakumar might get the chief minister’s post. Since there is no clarity on Siddaramaiah passing the baton to Shivakumar after two or three years, a big chunk of the Gowdas are slowly returning to the JDS, their party of first choice.
Before 2019, in a Congress-JDS-BJP triangular fight, the Congress could do well in the Old Mysore region, only because of splitting of anti-Congress votes between JDS and BJP. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP swept the polls, with the Modi wave decimating the ruling alliance of Congress and JDS.
The Congress claims the JDS-BJP alliance will suffer but the alliance partners rubbish the claims, saying the Lingayat and Vokkaliga combination is perfectly compatible with each other, unlike the Congress-JDS partnership.
Speaking to News18, Siddaramaiah said the sole purpose of BJP wooing the JDS into its fold is to destroy the latter and make Karnataka a bipolar state.
“The BJP knows it can never win Old Mysore region on its own. They are planning to destroy the JDS by joining hands with them. The Gowda family is desperate for power and Kumaraswamy has walked into their trap which will finally end his political career,” he said.
Shivakumar agrees with Siddaramaiah on the issue. “This alliance is an opportunistic one. Both have no principles. They were abusing each other till the assembly elections. They have come together only for the sake of power. Finally, the JDS will be swallowed up by the BJP,” he said.
If the alliance clicks, BJP-JDS can certainly beat Congress in most seats, their strategists argue. The Congress hopes that the mobilisation of AHINDA or Backward Classes, Minorities and SCs/STs who are more in number against the upper caste alliance, can halt the march of PM Modi and Gowda.
The JDS is contesting on three seats — Hassan, Mandya and Kolar. Gowda’s grandson and sitting MP Prajwal Revanna has been repeated from Hassan and Kumaraswamy himself is contesting in Manday. The BJP is contesting in the remaining 25 Lok Sabha seats.
If this electoral arrangement succeeds, they might stay together for a longer period. If it fails, the outcome would be easy to predict.
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