Many stalwarts, leaders with proven record of work in the parent party have tried and failed to chalk out an independent political life outside the fold of the parent party and have found themselves cast mercilessly out of the mainstream of political life.
The list is long enough, starting with starting with late K H Patil, Devaraj Urs, Bangarappa, Ramakrishna Hegde and not but least the former Prime Minister, H D Devegowda. Of them barring K H Patil all were former Chief Ministers and K H Patil was of the chief ministerial material though had no opportunity to shepherd the states affairs.
Three of them belong to Congress and the other two belong to the Janata Dal, a new experiment initiated in Karnataka to float the third political force, which has fallen asunder both at the state and the national level.
It is now the turn of the BJP, which has been in power for the past six years including the stint it had as partner in coalition, to produce one such person from its own stables. The BJP’s first Chief Minister, Mr. Yeddyurappa, turned former Chief Minister, and is all poised to join the club. He has served notice of his intention to float his own party and try his electoral luck. The question is whether he will succeed in his gamble or meet the same fate as that of his esteemed predecessors.
It is the personal ego rather than anything else that has prompted these worthies to launch themselves on what is regarded as politically suicidal path. Before their tiff with the bosses, all of them had a proven record of service in the tasks assigned to them in their parent party.
Devaraj Urs for example was the man chosen by late Indira Gandhi when she caused the split in late 60s, by floating her own party the Congress (R). Urs started out single handedly built the party brick by brick and played a crucial role in the partys resounding victory in 1971 parliament and 1972 assembly polls. Urs had the distinction of being perhaps the only Congress Minister who implemented both in letter and spirit the 20 point programme of the party. It was during his second tenure as the Chief Minster in the post 1978 period, he developed rift with Indira Gandhi, broke away from the party to head the Congress (U), which failed to click in the next assembly election. This is despite the fact that Urs had reputation of giving a political identity to the Backward Classes.
K H Patil,’s rise in political ladder came out on the plank of anti Congressism initially but he was drawn to Congress during the days of Indira Gandhis rebellion to become one of the valuable colleagues and comrade in arm of Devaraj Urs. As the specially chosen president of the state unit of the Congress of Indira Gandhi, he came in conflict with Urs in Karnataka and when Urs withheld the financial help to the run the organisation, Patil proved that he party did not depend on the charity of the then Chief Minister. He once mobilised the party MLAs in the Rajbhavan for a headcount to prove that Urs had lost the majority support within the ruling party and made him quit. Urs bounced back to power in 1978 and rival Congress unit headed by K H Patil was total washout in the polls. It could win two seats and polled 7.89% of the votes. Though Patil returned to the party after the exit of Urs, he had lost the political primacy and the Chief Ministers post eluded him till the last.
Bangarappa who was anointed as the Chief Minister of the state in as the ailing Chief Minister Veerendra Patil, who had successfully piloted the partys return to power in 1989, had been given marching orders by Rajiv Gandhi in less than a year in office, also did not long. Bangarappa fell out of the favour of the then Prime Minister late P V Narasimha Rao. And went out of launch his own brand of Congress called Karnataka Congress Party (KCP) as it was known. In the very first trial of strength in 1994 election his bluff was called. He could win ten seats to poll little over 7% of the polled votes. But he had the pyrrhic satisfaction blocking chances of Congress retaining power. Seeing that there was no future for the party, the hand few KCP legislators moved over to Congress leaving Bangarappa in the lurch. Again he had lost the political sheen. Though he came back into the Congress again and later moved over to BJP, the lost political élan never returned.
The fall of the Ramakrishna Hegde and Devegowda, two of the original founders of the idea of the formation of the third front, runs rather identically. First it was Devegowda who rose in rebellion under the spacious plea of inadequate resources for irrigation development, and later brought down his own party government lead by S R Bommai in 1988. In the 1989 his outfit succeeded in winning two seats and polled a little over 11% of the votes. But his entry had a decisive impact in spoiling chances of Janata Dal retaining power and paved way for the return of Congress after a gap of five years.
After seeing the futility of ploughing a lonely furrow, Devegowda made it back to the parent party after showing signs of repentance to be rehabilitated as the state party president. He hit a jackpot in the 1994 elections, when he could become the Chief Minister and within two years he hit another jackpot. The Chief Minister, with a just 16 MPs in the loksabha catapulted himself as the Prime Minister due to quirk of circumstances outwitting Ramakrishna Hegde who was eyeing on the post, since Gowda was safe in the home turf as the Chief Minister. Devegowda who is known to be vindictive in political life, did not spare the Samaritan who had given a him a new lease of political life and went to expel Ramakrishna Hegde, from the party, notwithstanding the fact that Hegde was one of the pillars of the party.
As a result the onetime national icon, Ramakrishna Hegde, often projected by the media as the Prime Minister in waiting, found himself reduced to the state of regional leader in Karnataka. And the new outfit that he formed the Janata Dal (U) held on to the power for a while before going down in the next assembly election of 1999 to be completely wiped out in 2004.
Devegowda in his hurry to drum out Hegde could hardly realise that by drumming out Hegde, he was cutting at the very branch on which he was standing. His new outfit the Janata Dal S failed to catch the imagination of the voters and could hardly carry the legacy of the Janata Dal. The one time Prime Minister has found himself heading a “national party” with a sub regional presence in Karnataka. His politics at the moment is centred around not on how his party could come to power (which is impossible at the moment) but on how to play the number game in this coalition of Karnataka politics to his advantage. He is confined to play a third fiddle in the state politics.
Now comes Yeddyurappa. It is an undeniable fact that Yeddyurappa has played a stellar role in the growth of the party in Karnataka. As a matter of fact both of them grew together. As the party continued to acquire electoral clout moving from the leading opposition party to partner in a coalition government and later became ruling party on his own, there was a commensurate rise in the status of Yeddyurappa, who moved gradually to the top to become a Deputy Chief Minister and later Chief Minister in 2008. Nobody grudged the rise in the status and for the first three years of his regime as the first BJP Chief Minister he was the tallest of the political leader in Karnataka, with none having the stature and gumption to challenge him either within or outside the party. The high command trusted him implicitly. He was looking forward for an effortless completion of the present term and looked for a second term, which would have helped him to beat the record of eight years reign as the Chief Minister held by Devaraj Urs.
The vortex of the scams of sorts including that of illegal mining in which he and his government was drawn, triggered off his downfall. The indictment by the Karnataka Lokayukta and denotification of land scams proved to be last nail in the coffin.
The high command which had given him a long rope had no other alternative in asking him to demit office till he was cleared of the charges. But he hedged for a while before giving in. It was in this process that two of the hitherto unknown facets of his personality have come for public attention.
One is that from a loyal soldier of the party, Yeddyurappa has graduated to nurse a feeling that he is bigger than the party and that it is the party which should be beholdened to him than otherwise.
Secondly, his excessive obsession with power. It looks as if, Yeddyurppa cannot live without power for a single moment. All that tolerance which was there when he was in the opposition, appears have been overtaken by his six years experience in power. He feels that he is inevitable for Karnataka and that it is he only who is capable of leading the state on the path of progress. It is he or the deluge. This is what he would like the people to believe.
It is because of this that he has started throwing tantrums at all and sundry, hitting out at the national leaders, and deriding the party patriarch like Advani, berating the national leadership in general and national president Mr Nitin Gadkari in particular. He has been quite critical of the way the party government headed by his own chosen protégés are functioning.
The prospects under circumstances for the Yeddyurappa’s new political outfit in the forthcoming assembly elections have to be assessed taking into consideration some ground political reality.
Basically, the Karnataka voters are hardly prone to change their political preferences in the elections. It has been seen that despite the change in state leadership, there is hardly any change at the voters level as a class, with little variation here and there. The political adventurism by anybody has hardly been able to influence the voters in any appreciable manner.
Added to this are some of the developments, which are peculiar to Yeddyurappa’s case. One is the projection of Yeddyurappa as a Lingayat leader. Castewise constituencies developed by the leaders have never been beneficial, as has been experienced by Devaraj Urs, and Bangarappa, (OBCs) and Devegowda (Vokkalingas). In the ultimate analysis, it has always proved to be counterproductive. Besides, Yeddyurappa inherited title after the exit of Ramakrishna Hegde, a non lingayat who was immensely trusted by Lingayats of Northern Karnataka.
Besides Yeddyurappas own political propensities, which were manifest in the recent days have hardly enhanced his profession, namely the obsession with political power, and projection of his image as something bigger than party, besides his own act of reneging the party, which has given him the stature. It is quite unlikely that the potent weapon of appealing to the sentiments of the people, which Yeddyurappa successfully worked during the 2008 election, projecting himself as a man wronged by the JDS, will work this time. For the things are different this time. He has not been hounded out of the party but it is the party, which is being virtually blackmailed by him. It is because of this that the spectre of political uncertainty has been hanging on the minds of his supporter legislators as the day of the reckoning is drawing near.
*The writer is a senior journalist and columnist based in Hubli
Comments
Add new comment