Siddaramaiah regime: Now playing in Karnataka

While Siddaramaiah has embraced the constituency of Devaraj Urs, the BJP borrows from Ramakrishna Hegde

May 10, 2017 12:05 am | Updated 12:05 am IST

Wikimedia commons

Wikimedia commons

The Siddaramaiah regime in Karnataka is pushing towards a political polarisation of social constituencies which, while subjecting a well-tried-out strategy in the State to test, is likely to have wider ramifications for the future direction of the Congress party elsewhere.

The outline of this political strategy was initially laid down by the late Devaraj Urs as Chief Minister of the State (1972-77), and its success even made him challenge Indira Gandhi at the near end of his political career and befriend Chaudhary Charan Singh during the closing days of Janata Party rule (1977-1979) at the Centre. Urs bypassed the existing revenue bureaucracy and set up a collective of officials and elected local leaders at the tehsil level all across the State to confer land entitlement on the direct cultivator, estimate surplus land, and adjudge claims for homestead land by landless labour; and set up the credit and marketing infrastructure for the peasantry.

He also directed an inventory and classification of backward classes and extended to them reservation in employment, higher education and other social sector policies. He took initiative for the organisation of relatively marginal backward castes, and decisively shifted political recruitment to offices and positions to backward classes and minorities undercutting the prevailing dominance of upper castes, mainly Lingayats, Vokkaligas and Brahmins. The outcome was an electorally formidable platform of the lower agrarian strata, the backward classes, the minorities and a section of Dalits and Adivasis.

 

Political contestation in cities did not enjoy the same weight in the 1970s as it does today, and was taken care of by mainstream Congress politics. After Urs, many leaders in the State have invoked his legacy but had little of his adroitness to mount a distinct conception of social justice in practice. The political constituency that Urs nurtured remained adrift. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has come to embrace it enthusiastically.

Complex agenda

Mr. Siddaramaiah was nurtured in a school of politics that did not assign centrality to state initiatives, to industry and the city, at least, as much as the Congress did till the early 1990s. His politics revolved around agrarian concerns with an assemblage of fragments of thoughts of Gandhi, Ram Manohar Lohia, and folklore. For long he worked with the non-Congress formation in Karnataka led by Ramakrishna Hegde and H.D. Deve Gowda, who were the backbone of the Janata formations in the State. But he was also the strident champion of backward classes and thought that there cannot be a level playing field for them without a regime of preferential policies. His partisanship with backward classes eventually made him part ways with Mr. Deve Gowda, whose social base of support was among the peasantry of the dominant castes, particularly Vokkaligas. When Mr. Siddaramaiah joined the Congress in 2005, its claim to represent the backward classes was reinforced alongside Dalits and minorities.

Mr. Siddaramaiah has also been one of the astute managers of the finances of the State, and has already presented 12 Budgets. A close scrutiny of these Budgets highlights that he has tended to focus resources on irrigation, roads and communication, and power. Industry in Karnataka has taken note of such disposition in spite of his mouthfuls of statements on social justice.

The Congress in power in Karnataka under Mr. Siddaramaiah’s leadership has pursued a complex social justice agenda, very different from the one mounted by Urs that focused on redistribution and access. It identifies certain key disadvantages of vulnerable social strata, such as the lower rungs of peasantry, below poverty line (BPL) families, the shelterless, schoolchildren, pregnant women and nursing mothers, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, transgenders, backward regions etc. and extends some support to overcome their disadvantage. Similarly the different authorities and corporations under the State reach out to a set of grievances and aspirations of religious and linguistic minorities, sustaining a stratum of elite among them.

 

The regime has also reached out proactively in support of Kannada, folk traditions, and local icons. Mr. Siddaramaiah himself is an astute speaker of rustic and idiomatic Kannada with an excellent sense of irony and humour. Such disposition and policy measures have enormously increased the presence of vulnerable groups in the public domain that often finds expression in highly variegated but localised social assertions and movements. The social justice policy initiatives have also nurtured a huge clientele who have stakes in this patronage. Besides, it has articulated cleavages among Dalit communities, the north and south divide in the State, the indigenous philistines and the globalisers etc. Overall, the regime has invoked a stronger Karnataka identity without overtly splashing it across.

The BJP calculus

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) opposition has pandered to the Hindutva agenda to unite one of the most socially heterogeneous States in India while making the Lingayats, a dominant and numerous community, its social anchor. B.S. Yeddyurappa, the leader of this formation, a Lingayat himself, has tried to highlight the grievances of the upper strata of peasantry to reinforce his base of support.

The BJP thinks that it will be able to enlist the support of the service castes among backward castes, a section of Dalits aggrieved with the working of preferential measures, and the urban middle classes at the hustings. However, there is a nagging feeling within it that this not adequate to seize an electoral victory. A few leaders of the party have tried to form a backward caste brigade within its fold, but the party leadership is divided on the issue.

In the 1980s Ramakrishna Hegde set up a truce between the Lingayats and Vokkaligas against the alliance that Urs had nurtured. But it was far too caught in the rivalry among dominant castes for power and eventually gave place to alternative alliances under the leadership of a dominant caste. The recent entry of S.M. Krishna, an Vokkaliga, into the BJP was an attempt to resurrect the alliance that Hegde fathered. However, there is little that Mr. Krishna can bring to the BJP given the fact that Mr. Deve Gowda commandeers the Vokkaliga bastion more than anyone else.

Given this configuration of political equations, the balance at present is definitely tilted towards Mr. Siddaramaiah. Further, an alliance between Mr. Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (Secular) and the Congress in Karnataka, which is not unimaginable, would make them electorally formidable.

The persisting divides

However, what is too late for Mr. Siddaramaiah, as he is soon going to complete four years in power, is the little enablement that his initiatives have afforded to his political constituency at large. While he has succeeded in according a presence to backward classes, minorities, Dalits and other disadvantaged social groups, there is little that he has done by way of enabling these sections by redistributing assets and affording access. Even if he was not a position to shift resources decisively in favour of these sections like Urs did, he could have done much to put Kannada medium schools, that his clientele have to invariably resort to, on a par with the rest. Primary health care in Karnataka, as elsewhere in the country, is abysmal. The State is perennially prone to drought and the water table in large parts has sunk alarmingly low.

While the State was known for institutional corruption, some of the social sector policies of the government have given it a further fillip. Much of the economy is concentrated in Bengaluru and the southern part of the State and very little has been done to close the yawning gulf between North Karnataka and the rest of the State in this regard. While Muslims are still with the Siddaramaiah regime, a community divide in the State persists and the presence of Muslims in the mainstream economy is pitiably low. While the internal rivalry within the State Congress probably inhibited the Chief Minister from putting his best foot forward for long, political choices cannot always await opportune moments.

Valerian Rodrigues is a former professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and currently national fellow, Indian Council of Social Science Research

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