Who’ll be eating crow? And who’ll do the serving?

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For the next seven days, the silence in both camps should be deafening. Neither B.S. Yeddyurappa nor Sadananda Gowda will make the kind of statements that have pushed the state BJP to breaking point this last week. The gag order from the BJP top brass until mad March comes to a close, is an attempt to put the lid back on the uncomfortable truths that tend to slip out in this oh-so-leaky ship.

Whether either camp — should that be camps — is immune to provocation however is open to question. And that’s not to say that the calculated undermining of the other will end. No, no, no. Not, the bluster and contempt for the other, expressed in private, and camouflaged as camaraderie and the greater good of the party in public; not, the leaks — one about Mr Yeddyurappa calling for a copy of the budget that he had absolutely nothing to do with, convinced he was to present the budget as chief minister; or the other about Chief Minister Sadananda Gowda apparently upset over the fact that L.K. Advani had given even a ten minute audience to his bete noire.

After all, when he, the CM and his three man council had met him for a half-hour tete-a-tete earlier in the day, Advani had been all too willing to slam BSY for not campaigning in Udupi-Chikamagalur, secreting 62 legislators at a resort and not paying their respects to Advani’s comrade-in-arms V.S. Acharya on the opening day of the budget session.

Fact is, Yeddyurappa, was persuaded by his own close aides to attempt a mending of the fences with Advani, whom he had deeply offended by instituting a boycott of his rally at the city’s College grounds during the BJP patriarch’s rath yatra. This, in the hope that he would drop his antipathy towards the Karnataka strongman, and stop being the only ‘nay’ in the BJP high command which had all but decided to bring him back.

Clearly, what happens in Delhi does not stay in Delhi. The buzz doing the rounds is that Yeddyurappa has finally had someone as senior and as savvy as Arun Jaitley explain to him that the BJP’s reluctance to reinstate him in the top job was not personal, and had nothing to do with the perception in BSY’s camp that they had gone back on their promised reinstatement on the ascetic Advani’s distate for promoting politicians who indulged in personal gain… and that the same reasoning that drove the BJP to ask him to step down still prevailed — that is, while they had promised that he would be back once the Lokayukta cleared his name, the added complication of a Supreme Court appointed Central Empowered Committee set to pronounce on his case had muddied matters.

Ergo, the party’s inability to foist him on their shoulders and declare him the reigning deity. Ergo, the smiles that didn’t quite make it to either man’s eyes when they came home to Namma Bengaluru! But this too must be said — the party’s summoning of one faction leader after another does not bode well as a strategy to keep the saffron flock together. While it may be attempting to ascertain how many legislators actually support an angry Yeddyurappa, straining at the leash to get back into his prized office, the rifts within, as each camp enunciates its unique caste identity over its saffron persuasion, comes through.

So you have the amiable Ashok, once seen as a Gowda leader of the future suddenly growing into a newly formidable force, able to call on the loyalties of ten legislators or thereabouts. Ditto, Balachandra Jarkiholi, who young as he is, and deeply inimical to Yeddyurappa, represents yet another force in the OBC segment of society and apparently has at least 10-15 men at his side; and now Aravind Limbavalli to add another stripe to the BJP’s rainbow coalition.

Sadananda Gowda determined to stay the course must be counting every man Jack at his side. The party’s neutral brainstrust made up of law minister Suresh Kumar, Govind Karjol and to a lesser extent, the state party president K.S. Eshwarappa remain Gowda’s men, given that the task entrusted to them by the BJP president and conscience-keeper RSS is that the CM is given every assistance in running the state in as clean a manner as possible.

But the fact is, if the party high command hews to BSY, these men will have no choice but to go back to working with BSY.

And if push comes to unseemly shove, Mr Gowda, however scrupulously clean he has been, in not acceding to any request to bend the law, simply does not have the numbers to push his case. What he does have is a newly minted reputation. In the hurly-burly of politics, where the once puritanical BJP must come to terms with the grit and gore of electioneering and doling out the loaves of office while in government, that may not be enough. Laying the blame for the Udupi-Chikmagalur loss at BSY’s door and his boycott of the campaign is also an interesting charge, because it acknowledges the uncomfortable truth — without BSY and the Lingayats that he can call to man an election campaign, can the BJP not win a seat? Is that what the chief minister, chafing at losing a seat he had won less than four years ago, has not enunciated but realised?

However much you may want to ignore it, there is the matter of the 62 man elephant in the room. Decry it, cast aspersions on them as men — and woman — who are only close to Yeddyurappa because of reasons of caste and the hope that power will bring them the pelf, it does not take away from the fact that it was not ten or fifteen or even 30 as everyone said the ageing lion had by his side but 62 legislators. Aides close to him say that all 62 will stay true, and that another 20 will be bees to the BSY honey trap when activated. Sadananda Gowda’s supporters across the newfound Vokkaliga-OBC-SC-ST grouping scoff at the numbers. But if there is a show of hands, a ballot as there was when Sadananda Gowda was elected over Jagadish Shettar as chief minister, that vote, let me remind you had the same configuration — 62 out of 120 for Gowda — and this was, at a signal from BSY.

Shettar is now firmly in Yeddyurappa’s camp, and he’s telling everyone he is there to stay, and that as a Lingayat he must show solidarity with the Lingayat chief; which rules him out from cutting into the Lingayat numbers.

But come, the end of this week, and it will be interesting to see how the bid to bring BSY back, actually pans out. For all you know, it may not even go to a bruising run-off. For all you know, it may all fizzle out. Or not.

Crow, not the tastiest of dishes on any given day… Far less so, when it is served up cold. Except, we don’t quite know who’ll be doing the serving, and who, the eating.