Politics, no bloodier than usual!

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Revenge is a dish best served cold… At least in the H.D. Deve Gowda household! So, while all eyes are on the raging B.S. Yeddyurappa, and what the BJP’s fallen leader will do in the aftermath of the cataclysmic Supreme Court ordered CBI probe into the land denotification scam and the quid pro quo thereof, Karnataka’s canniest campaigner must be quietly rubbing his hands in glee. At a plan executed to perfection.

When the story of the unravelling of a leader and his party are chronicled, the power of this standout octogenarian to destroy politicians who stand in his path must not be forgotten. He’s done it to everyone. Well, almost everyone. From stalwarts like Ramakrishna Hegde and S.R. Bommai, to J.H. Patel, and to younger men within his own party who aspired to lead, like Siddaramaiah, Byre Gowda senior and Nage Gowda. All, systematically cut to size.

What chance did an acerbic accountant from Shikaripur with links to the holier-than–thou scripture-spouting RSS, and a rank novice in Karnataka’s labyrinthine political game, really have? HDG’s mantra has always been – buying friends on the way up is as important as not making enemies on the way down. How else will you watch your back when slip-siding your way out the door! So while Gowda’s lived by the time-honoured mantra ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’ Yeddyurappa missed out on the lesson completely while shimmying up – or down – the greasy pole of Karnataka’s dog-eat-dog politics. Lesson one - Mr Deve Gowda. Never get on his wrong side.

As the BJP struggles to come to terms with what could be its last gasp in the south, before it crumbles in the face of a series of events that seem unconnected, but in fact are not, the civility of public discourse maybe as much a casualty as the rise and rise of political skullduggery.

The bad blood between the JD(S) and BSY, which has never forgiven the former CM for playing the ‘betrayal’ card to rob them of a better showing in 2008, is clearly at the heart of Deve Gowda’s, cold-blooded collation of Yeddyurappa’s alleged misappropriation of wealth.

And, in allowing bureaucrats who share his caste and in whom he placed an undue amount of trust, to mislead him on what’s right and what’s wrong when in government, Yeddyurappa laid himself wide open to just such an attack. But Karnataka’s sobriquet as the ‘nation’s most corrupt’ brought on by the unholy nexus of the greedy – miners and realtors, politicians and corrupt government officials – is not new. It was a reality long before BSY’s tenure. But who’s going to be able to do a HDG on that?

Therefore, while the fall-out of the unspoken feud between the JD(S) paterfamilias, and a BJP leader trying to establish his hold over a bureaucracy, whose loyalties were questionable was only going to go one way (in favour of the older man ) it is the schisms within the BJP itself that are quite startling. This is Rome, at war with itself.

So many leaders scheming against one other, caste and old affiliations, far more compelling a case for loyalty than the saffron persuasion, it was the glue of power that held it together thus far. A glue, that’s clearly giving way as the options before this deeply conflicted party where every man is now for himself is reduced to keep one eye on Yeddyurappa and one eye on his own portfolio. As the walls close in, a desperate man could resort to desperate measures. Will he go through with the threat to walk out of the party on Monday? Will he take the party down with him as he self-combusts? Will he and his kin go to jail? What will that do to the party as a whole?

Insiders say that as a last ditch measure, BSY willpush, via his handful of supporters, for a legislative party meet where his camp will call for a change in party leadership. Going by the dwindling numbers thus far, he may not have support beyond his seven to ten man coterie. BSY’s reasoning - if it can be called that - is that with elections less than a year away, it would make sense for him to push for his own man as CM – a Lingayat – failing which he will get his loyalists to resign en masse and play for sympathy from among his core constituency. Now, that may or may not fly.

Curious, how the seers after their shock dalliance with the Congress’ chairperson Sonia Gandhi, reverted back to type on Friday, inviting BSY (and Sadananda Gowda) to Nanjangud. They didnt say a word in support, nor did the CM as news broke of the apex court ordering a CBI probe. Perhaps like everyone else in the party, they were caught in a bind, unable to signal support. Some say that the math’s anger over the BSY transgression in nominating a non-Lingayat as his successor, without consulting them or the RSS lingers. That long term, the maths could still be cold to BSY.

In the here and now, even if BSY manages to get ten or twenty, or more – even if the signatures on that letter asking for a legislature party meet may not all be by his people – he believes that pushing for a Lingayat replacement will be helpful when he goes back to his core constituency and says that it was Sadananda Gowda who backtracked on his promise to cater to Lingayat interests, and that the BJP had been unwilling to let him pick a new man – a Lingayat like Murugesh Nirani or C.M. Udasi – as his choice for CM. Can he pull it off?

With no-one quite sure how long this standoff between him and the party will continue, every camp has its own take, on the band-aid stratagem that will help the bleeding BJP government in Karnataka hobble along until elections are due in 2013. If, it even lasts that long.

High-minded claptrap
about the chief minister finally being free, to get on with government is just that – rubbish. Sadananda Gowda hasn’t been able to govern thus far. The ministers who owe allegiance to BSY, hold key posts, and have stymied every initiative. No files have moved. No work is done.

The BJP’s ill-starred plan to launch big-ticket infrastructure projects to tell the voter how hard they tried, will, given its track record so far, can only go so far. So will the CM turn to the JD(S), to step in and prop up the Gowda government if BSY pulls the plug. Is that where Sadananda Gowda draws his confidence from? Really? After HDG worked so hard to light a fuse inside the BJP? But then, stranger things have happened.

The Congress, without a leader of any standing must be pleased to see the BJP’s only Lingayat election iwinner so isolated within his own party. But until it is able to find its own winner, even if it is to only to fall back on S.M. Krishna, it will be unable to capitalise on the anger against the BJP’s spectacular mismanagement of the state. Remarkable, the BJP’s uncanny ability of getting rid of the men and women who win elections for them.

Much simpler in my hometown in north Kerala where they cut you to ribbons and leave you to bleed to death. Here, you live on, coping with the taint, the shame and the mud thrown at you. In lieu, of the knife in the back. Politics, no bloodier than usual!