by T S Sudhir 21 mins ago
Senior BJP leader and former deputy prime minister L K Advani is no fan of B S Yeddyurappa. So much so that in his blog analysing the Karnataka results, he even does away with the nicety of referring to his former colleague by his proper name, reducing Yeddyurappa to ‘Yeddi’. You can read his full blogpost here.
Advani takes on journalists who have blamed his jugalbandi with Ananth Kumar for showing the door to Yeddyurappa and thereby losing its gateway to south India. He offers a meek defence, taking refuge in the technicality that it was Yeddyurappa who “broke away from the BJP and decided to form a factional party of his own, the KJP”. He blames his partymen for delaying action against the former chief minister even when it was apparent that he “was unabashedly indulging in corruption”. He expresses his disapproval of the “frantic efforts” that went on for several months to placate Yeddyurappa, by “condoning his peccadilloes”. Calling the party’s handling of Karnataka “absolutely opportunistic”, Advani says the BJP’s “response to the Karnataka crisis was not at all a minor indiscretion.”
L K Advani is clearly trying to take the moral high ground on Karnataka, suggesting that it is better to lose a government than to compromise on principles of honesty. Fair enough and for that he deserves to be complimented and respected. But then if you rewind to 2008, you will realise this Advani blog is nothing but an attempt to gain personal mileage out of a political tragedy for the party.
Where was Mr Advani when ‘Operation Kamala’ was launched in 2008, with the blessings of the party high command, to lure independent and opposition MLAs to cross over to the BJP? Surely they were not changing political colours for charity. The BJP had fallen short of a simple majority (110 BJP MLAs in a House of 224, where the half way mark was 112) and needed to shore up its numbers. Gali Somasekhara Reddy, the second of the Bellary brothers, says it in so many words that if it was not for Gali Janardhana Reddy’s financial muscle, the lotus would have never bloomed in Karnataka. Did you, Mr Advani, not know that tainted Reddy money was a factor in securing legitimacy for the BJP government in Bangalore? Did you protest then? If not, why?
LK Advani in this file photo. PTI
Which is why I say L K Advani’s blog reeks of hypocrisy. The same party turned a blind eye to the shenanigans of the Reddy brothers because it needed their money. What’s more, it even made two of the brothers — Janardhana Reddy and Karunakara Reddy — ministers in the Karnataka government. How is it that Reddy corruption was okay for Mr Advani and Yeddyurappa’s corruption was not. A party with a difference surely does not mean different yardsticks for different sorts of corruption.
Yes, just like you dumped Yeddyurappa, forcing him to quit the chief minister’s post, you also cold-shouldered Janardhana Reddy, once he was arrested in the illegal mining case and lodged in Hyderabad central prison. Your esteemed colleague Sushma Swaraj who was once a regular visitor to the Reddy household in Bellary and was seen as their political godmother in Delhi, withdrew her blessings the moment Janardhana Reddy became an undertrial. Yes, for the kind of loot they indulged in in Bellary, they deserved it and more. But you and your party are equally guilty of a use and throw policy. If their shirts are dirty, some of the dirt is sticking on to your kurta as well, Advaniji.
But I agree with Mr Advani that expectations from the BJP were high in Karnataka. The people elected your candidates with fond hopes in 2008. If the BJP has lost the election this time, it is not only because of a Yeddyurappa. It is also because you opened your innings in Bangalore by fixing the match. It is also because the BJP failed to provide a government that works efficiently. It is also because the people of Karnataka had enough of infighting within the BJP, resort politics and political instability. It is because the Karnataka BJP failed to provide a developmental narrative that the party’s governments in Gujarat and Chhattisgarh have.
The BJP failed abysmally in political management, unable to handle a temperamental and powerful regional satrap like Yeddyurappa with tact. He had become so much of a bully that he seriously believed the BJP minus Yeddyurappa was a zero. Allowing Ananth Kumar to play behind-the-scenes politics against him was like showing Yeddyurappa a red rag and the BJP in Delhi could not stop a loyal partyman from turning renegade. No surprise that Yeddyurappa turned into a fidayeen and destroyed both himself and the BJP in the Karnataka elections.
The strong words that Mr Advani uses in his blog for Yeddyurappa, I suspect, are part of a strategy to ensure the whispers within the BJP to get Yeddyurappa back into the fold after the crushing defeat, do not gain volume and do not become a loud chorus.
Mr Advani, in his blog, surmises that what went against the BJP in Karnataka, will also go against the Congress at the national level. Quite possible. Because the Congress is making pretty much the same mistakes the BJP made in Karnataka.
We need more Advanis who articulate the need to have zero tolerance to corruption. My only prayer is it should be timely and with consistency, without which it is impossible to impress the umpires (the people in this case) in the Indian Political League.
http://www.firstpost.com/politics/karnataka-results-advanis-criticism-of-bjp-reeks-of-hypocrisy-775597.html
Karnataka voters send a message: Shape up or ship out
by N S Rajaram on 13 May 2013 0 Comment
Almost as interesting as the results of the Karnataka state assembly have been the explanations and opinions put forth by media talking heads and political experts. They tell us more about these experts and their thinking than they do about the ground realities in the state and what voters expect from their elected leaders today. I am a native of Karnataka; my ancestors have lived here and participated in the life and affairs of the state going back more than 400 years. So caste relationships in Karnataka are not to me numbers and abstractions, but part of daily life. And they are nothing like what these experts reported. Also they are not frozen in time - a point made by India’s greatest sociologist, the late MN Srinivas.
What strikes me about this election, and its coverage and commentary by experts is that voters by and large are ahead of the experts and possibly ahead even of the politicians. Where the latter are still trapped in thinking in terms of caste and community vote banks, voters are increasingly looking at performance. They want their elected representatives to engage in activities that will improve their lives, not in gestures and postures that appeal to this or that caste group or ideological representatives. And corruption is very much part of it for it both drains public resources and distracts from productive work.
First, to state the obvious, the BJP lost resoundingly in Karnataka. It lost 70 seats (from 110 down to 40) and 13 percentage points in vote share. The media by and large saw it in terms of the loss of Lingayat vote due to Yeddyurappa’s departure. Some intellectuals on the other hand attributed it to the voters’ disenchantment with Hindutva (which was not a major part of the BJP campaign). Both are wrong. Most ministers - 15 out of 17 - lost their seats. It was a vote against the incumbent. Even without the split with Yeddyurappa leading the campaign, the BJP would still have lost. Based on performance the BJP deserved to lose.
It was the same with Vokkaligas and other castes: the voters voted against the incumbent across all castes. Shobha Karandlaje, a minister with a relatively good image and non-Lingayat who jumped ship and joined Yeddyurappa’s party, lost from Bangalore where the BJP has done relatively well. Such resounding loss with most ministers being booted out tells the real story. They were voted out for not doing what they were elected to do. I live in Bangalore and can say that the BJP Government’s performance was dismal. It was dismal even before Yeddyurappa engineered the split, and no better after. Everyone knew this including the BJP brass.
One of the more absurd claims made, especially by left-leaning ‘experts’ like Lord Meghnad Desai (who knows nothing of Karnataka) was that Narendra Modi has no voter appeal. Modi spent two days in Karnataka and addressed five rallies in three districts out of thirty. BJP did comparatively better in districts where Modi campaigned, winning 50 percent of the seats, while winning only 10 percent in the remaining districts. Karnataka voters threw out 15 of 17 ministers. Surely, this is a verdict against their performance in Karnataka not Modi’s performance in Gujarat!
The point of all this is that there is now a growing mismatch between ground realities and what experts and even politicians are offering. Voters want performance, not slogans - Hindutva or Secularism - or abstract analysis and numerology based on caste, community and vote banks. This appears to be a new trend in Indian politics over the past five years that experts, still trapped in old dogmas seem to have missed. Increasingly voters expect performance from their leaders - programs and ideas that improve their lives. Karnataka is the only latest example.
Voters in UP gave Mayawati a mandate which she squandered with gimmicks like parks and statues that made no difference to their lives. Having given her five years, the voters threw her out. Basic necessities of life like roads, clean water and electricity are still out of reach for the great majority of Indians in states like UP. Narendra Modi in Gujarat is popular because he is focusing on basic needs like electricity and water. It is gross misreading to see his popularity as being based on Hindutva. Keshubhai Patel failed to dislodge Modi because he was using an outdated formula like caste appeal. (Why is Modi’s caste never mentioned; that he is an OBC?)
Seen against the background of voters’ expectation on performance, the new Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah’s early moves are not encouraging. It was widely reported that instead of visiting religious heads to seek their blessings as commonly done by politicians, the CM-elect visited senior Kannada writers GS Shivarudrappa, Chandrashekar Kambar and UR Anantamurthy - all associated with leftist political leanings. It would have sent a better message had he met progressive business leaders like Kiran Majumdar, Azim Premji and others who want to improve the living conditions in Bangalore.
To his credit, Shivarudrappa asked Siddaramaiah to make Karnataka “liveable for all.” Politicians everywhere better take this message to heart, for increasingly that will be the standard by which voters will judge them and vote. That was so in UP where the voters threw out Mayawati, in Gujarat where voters gave Narendra Modi a massive mandate and now in Karnataka where the voters threw out a bickering, non-performing government. This is what to look for in the elections over the next year from the Rajasthan Assembly to the Lok Sabha.
Karnataka is a sophisticated state. Its recent results have lessons for everyone. People are impatient for results. They don’t want more promises of ideology or handouts. They want their politicians to improve their daily lives, not give sops to caste identity or empty promises. In short the voters’ message to politicians is “Shape up or ship out.”
http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=2798