Siddaramaiah.
From Siddaramanahundi village. Proud son of Mysore.
And Karnataka’s soon to be Chief Minister -to be sworn in at 11.30 am on Monday.
First job at hand? Convince the people of this state that he is more than just a leader of the Kurubas, the shepherd caste that he belongs to, and that he is a leader of every caste, community and tribe, across this hugely multi-faceted state.
Siddaramaiah will be sworn in 24 hours from now to top off the huge upset victory of a Congress that may have finally regained its lost hubris in this state. The first Kuruba leader to make it to the post of the state’s chief executive, he has broken the stranglehold of the Lingayats and Vokkaligas over the state.
Why are Siddaramaiah’s caste antecedents being talked up then, when until now, both he and his Kuruba supporters underplayed it, talking instead of Ahinda, Karnataka’s rainbow coalition of OBCs, minorities and the underprivileged? What was the point? Make Siddaramaiah sound parochial, casteist and not the traditional Congress politician who cuts across caste and religion? Why bring up caste at all, when high-minded pundits across the spectrum say this poll was a vote like no other, that a discerning and angry electorate, shrugged off the caste straightjacket that B.S. Yeddyurappa’s BJP tapped into, and voted for the man, the woman, the party; that caste was of little consideration.
Except, even that is true only in some small pockets of the state, where there is a sea change in the way some people are beginning to look at candidates, but not the kind of scale required for people to shed hidebound casteist mindsets and vote for the candidate, not his caste.
The majority community, the Lingayats, for instance stuck to their script and found that the confused vote for the BJP and the KJP ended up benefiting the Congress.
As for the other majority community, the Vokkaligas, that vote too went along predictable lines. Except, they upped their catch from 28 to 40, but not enough to make a difference.
But the manner in which the third major community in the state, the Kurubas, voted together, en block, could be the real story of this election, simply for the events that it has set in motion.
Siddaramaiah, so long the outsider looking in, could no longer be ignored. The Congress, faced suddenly with an embarrassment of riches in the number of candidates for chief minister – from one Siddaramaiah, the Kuruba, to the little army that sprang up overnight — Dalit leader Mallikarjun Kharge, the Lingayat’s Shamanur Shivashankarappa, Verrappa Moily, the OBC leader, R.V. Deshpande, a Brahmin, and D.K.
Shivakumar, the Vokkaliga, demonstrating how deep divisions of caste and lineage run. The Congress had no choice but to shut the race down. The Kurubas, voting down to the last man for their leader Siddaramaiah, so that he would become the chief minister were not going to back down.
Either he was going to be given the chance to be chief minister, or he was going to launch his own party.
And while there was little question that a solid Kuruba vote alone may not have been enough for this dramatic shift, and that a Congress victory of this scale needed the minorities and other communities – backward and forward – voting for it, the Kuruba vote which together makes up 8% of the electorate was a force. In the north, where Lingayats have called the shots, it transformed what may have been an otherwise modest victory into an outright majority.
Even diehard BSY supporter and hardcore Lingayat C.M. Udasi admitted as much.
The central, overwhelming message from the people: Punish the BJP for their demonstrable inability to govern and second, vote in a single party with enough numbers to ensure a stable government. So, too, this consolidation of the Kuruba vote, and the rise of a new third force.
The Congress’ swift moves to hold a secret ballot that would never have remained secret, and then quickly shift towards ascertaining the minds of its 121 MLAs, and then scrapping that, too, to say that the overwhelming ‘ayes’ were in favour of Siddaramaiah, signals that whether the ballots were as Antony said they were or not, Congress was not going to go down the BJP’s path and have a clutch of chief ministers and deputies.
The message they wanted to send out is that their formula – the consolidation of the KurubaOBC-SC-ST-Minority vote — was the new mantra. And the man to take it forward would be a 64-year-old with fresh legs.
Siddaramaiah, many say, has been humbled by the party’s decision. Others say his unspoken threat to leave the Congress, where long time Congressmen continue to carp at his claims of being a mass leader, was taken on board.
Few may remember 2006.
That’s when he broke with the party he had begun his political journey with, throwing sand in the eyes of Deve Gowda, taking a flight to Delhi, then to Mumbai, where he met then Maharashtra Governor S.M. Krishna for a quiet pow-wow, followed by a meeting with Congress chief Sonia Gandhi in Delhi, which SMK had initiated on his behalf.
A meeting that forged the bonds of trust that have led to this moment when he will finally head a Congress satrapy that he has been a part of for barely seven years. Through the many rings of fire that he has been made to jump since, and the sustained campaign of being an outsider, it’s probably the memory of that one gesture – and the many words of encouragement since – that has kept him from breaking with Congress and launching the Ahinda movement, which led to Deve Gowda dumping him in the first place. His Bellary rally proving to Delhi that he has the mojo.
For Siddaramaiah, who will have to face the dirty tricks brigade of H.D. Kumaraswamy, the incoming leader of the opposition and a bitter enemy of Siddaramaiah, in the House, Karnataka must hope that Siddaramaiah’s track record of being an efficient, clean man with proven administrative abilities, will be able to bite the HDK bullet. And survive.
Some say that in weaning away a man who could have grown into Gowda’s lieutenant, out of the JD(S) and into the Congress, was the culmination of a brilliant plan set in motion by Gowda’s arch-rival S.M. Krishna, to cut Gowda down to size, even as Krishna reinforced and tapped into Siddaramaiah’s long held fears that the JD(S) would never allow him, with no blood links to the Gowdas, to ever lead the so-called ‘father and son’ party.
Siddaramaiah has not forgotten the debt he owes SMK for helping him get his foot in the Congress door. He has visited the silver-haired patriarch several times already, and then twice again, on a key Friday when the Delhi group led by A.K. Antony sought to arrive at a consensus. SMK let it be known that he had no objection to throwing his weight behind the Kuruba leader in the face of a growing chorus from old Congressmen that they preferred the stolidity of Union Labour minister Mallikarjun Kharge.
Now that he has got what he wanted, he cannot fail us now.
The burden of expectations is huge. Just as in 2008, when we, the people of Karnataka, believed whole-heartedly that the BJP should be given a chance to prove they could live up to their rhetoric, so too, this time, with the man from Mysore.
He must make that jump from a leader of the Kuruba community, a voice of Ahinda, and reinvent himself as the man for all Karnataka, irrespective of caste or ideological moorings, and shepherd us out of this unholiest of pastures.
In Delhi, where the Congress party, buffeted from every side, must survive until next year, Karnataka must not only be able to deliver 20 MPs, it must not fall prey to Congress infighting.
Siddaramaiah has a year at best before the knives come out again. He must use the unexpected honeymoon to bring Karnataka back from the brink and prove the Good Shepherd that he can be.
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