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By Ramakrishna Upadhya : As Lingayat strongman Jagadish Shettar showed signs of revolt, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Karnataka quickly drafted former chief minister BS Yediyurappa to defend the party leadership’s decision to deny election tickets for May 10 polls to veterans like him and Laxman Savadi and condemn their moves to join Congress as “betrayal of the BJP” on the eve of elections.
Even as the BJP was yet to digest former deputy chief minister Savadi’s revolt, former chief minister Shettar, not finding his name even on the second candidates’ list, decided to avenge his “humiliation” by a party which he had served for over three decades. He moved towards the Congress, which is likely to field him as a candidate from the Hubballi-Dharwad Central constituency.
The soft-spoken Lingayat leader from northern Karnataka, who had served as the Speaker of the Assembly (2008-29), BJP minister (2009-12), chief minister (2012-13) and Leader of the Opposition (2014-18), besides being a six-term MLA, blamed “forces within the party inimical” to him for “drawing up a conspiracy” to keep him out of the election fray this time. He warned of adverse effects of his ouster from the BJP in at least 20 to 25 constituencies as there was a “swelling anger” among his followers in the Lingayat community.
Pressing panic button
While the central leadership of the BJP, which is bent upon introducing “new faces” in these elections, tried to ignore Savadi’s departure, it pressed the panic button on hearing Shettar’s threats and senior leaders like Union ministers Dharmendra Pradhan and Prahlad Joshi and Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai rushed to Shettar’s residence in Hubballi and tried to pacify him.
According to Bommai, Union home minister Amit Shah called up Shettar and offered to make him a Rajya Sabha member and take him to the Central cabinet after the Assembly elections were over, but Shettar refused to relent.
As the media persons bombarded Bommai with questions on the reasons for denying the ticket to Shettar, he failed to come up with a convincing answer, saying that the party had consciously adopted “a policy of change” and if Shettar was adamant about leaving despite being offered alternatives, “we very well know how to handle the situation.”
Two senior Lingayat leaders from north Karnataka switching sides to the Congress in succession has obviously delighted the Congress party, especially its leaders Siddarmaiah and DK Shivakumar. The Lingayats had nearly en masse turned away from the Congress after their tall leader Veerendra Patil was removed as chief minister in 1990 by the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in a “humiliating fashion.” The then Jan Sangh leader BS Yediyurappa, who was gaining popularity among people by leading the farmers and workers movements, also attracted the Lingayats, building a solid base for the BJP and ever since they have stayed with the Yediyurappa.
Did other aspirants conspire?
Sources in the BJP said it was Prahlad Joshi and Basavaraj Bommai who were “instrumental” in denying party ticket to Shettar on the pretext that it was time for the new generation to be introduced. Both are chief ministerial aspirants and Shettar being the senior-most Lingayat leader left in the race after the retirement of Yediyurappa, they wanted to keep him out of the picture. Joshi and Bommai also had the backing of BJP’s national general secretary Santosh, who too is an aspirant, besides having a long-running feud with Yediyurappa.
Unlike KS Eshwarappa, another senior leader sidelined after corruption charges were filed against him, Shettar has a relatively clean image and a long association with the party. His father SS Shettar, who hailed from Jan Sangh, was five-time mayor of Hubli-Dharwad municipal corporation, while his uncle, Sadashiva Shettar was the first Jan Sangh leader in south India to get elected to the Karnataka Legislative Assembly.
A law graduate and a practising advocate for two decades, Jagadish Shettar had won six consecutive terms to the Assembly starting from 1994 and he had even defeated Basavaraj Bommai once, who was a candidate of Janata Dal. When Bommai was chosen to succeed Yediyurappa in May 2021, Shettar decided to stay away from the cabinet rather work under his ‘junior.’
Impact on BJP and Congress
Though Shettar claimed after resigning from the BJP that he could influence the results in 20 to 25 seats, the BJP sources said he was no match to Yediyurappa when it came popularity among the people and such a threat was rather exaggerated. They said since Hubballi-Dharwad seat was a strong bastion of the BJP, Shettar contesting as a Congress candidate may not find it easy to win.
Shettar, one of the tall leaders of the BJP in Karnataka, unexpectedly joining the Congress just about three weeks before the elections, no doubt gives a psychological boost to the Congress. The party will be hoping that Shettar being a prominent Lingayat from north Karnataka, will be able to ‘transfer’ some of the community votes to the Congress enhancing its prospects of a clear majority.
But, experts believe, unlike Yediyurappa, Shettar has never been a mass leader who could sway the voters. In 2013, after Yediyurappa had left BJP to form the KJP, the onus was on Shettar to lead the BJP in the elections but he failed miserably.
Soon after Shettar rebelled and announced his decision to join the Congress, the BJP fielded Yediyurappa to launch a frontal attack on Shettar. He accused Shettar of “stabbing in the back” a party which had given him everything. The message that Yediyurappa was conveying to the BJP voters, particularly the Lingayats was that Shettar was a ‘betrayer’ and they should discard him.
With less than a month to go for the elections, apart from Yediyurappa, prime minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah are planning to undertake a series of public meetings and road shows to nullify the “negative sentiments” and hope to propel the party towards a majority. They have the experience of facing such a situation in Gujarat in the recent Assembly elections when wholesale changes had been made in the selection of candidates and had emerged triumphant. Whether a similar strategy can work in Karnataka remains to be seen.
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