Mamata’s olive branch to Sonia is a bid to thwart Congress-Left combine in WB

The cat is out of the bag. The verdict is out… loud and clear… but life must move on. There are three more crucial elections this year in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

Now, what does the Karnataka result mean for the Saffron party? After the Saffron party’s defeat in Karnataka, for now, the BJP is not in power in any state in the south and it is time, the party should get down to the details and analyse in-depth the mandate outcome.

However, with the Lok Sabha elections almost a year away, the party, for now, can focus on the upcoming elections in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh as I had mentioned above. As far as Lok Sabha is concerned, the party mustn’t have sleepless nights right away because with its supremacy in the northern and western states, the Saffron party can still easily assume a simple majority for Parliament given its current status as of date.

It may be noted that out of the 130 seats from the southern states clubbed together, only 30 had come from there. But as they say in politics, one must not take things lightly. The Karnataka results have already made other Opposition parties extremely active and the TMC boss has extended an olive branch to Sonia Gandhi albeit with a rider.

The Trinamool Congress is ready to extend support to the Congress in the 2024 general elections in regions where the Congress is strong, . But this offer comes with a rider and that is Congress, too, should reciprocate the political gesture by not fighting the Trinamool on a daily basis especially in states like Bengal.

To make this formula work, Banerjee stated that the Trinamool alone should be allowed to fight the BJP in Bengal without the Left-Congress combine cutting into its vote share.

“I think wherever the regional parties are strong like in Bihar, Odisha, Bengal, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and so many other states, these parties should be given priority to fight the BJP. And places where the Congress is strong, in the 200-odd seats which we have calculated, let them fight and we will give them support. But they must reciprocate by supporting the other political parties as well. If I offer you support in Karnataka, your policy should not be to fight me daily in my state. This is true for everybody,” Banerjee said at the state secretariat Nabanna on Monday.

This is the first time she has actually warmed up to the idea of having the Congress in the Opposition fold to take on the BJP. She has now put on the table a possible unity strategy for the Opposition camp. And it is a gameplan that includes the Congress. Political observers felt that Congress’s Karnataka performance may have forced Didi to address the Congress factor sooner than she would have liked to.

Starting off with a rider, “I am not a magician. And I am not at all an astrologer. I cannot say what will happen in future,” Banerjee was responding to a question on how she foresees the prospects of the Opposition’s one-on-one fight against the BJP with Congress in the equation.

“If you want to achieve some good things, then you must also be ready to make sacrifices in certain areas,” she declared, and added: “For the sake of saving the country, this should be a level playing ground for all parties. This must be done to save democracy and the people of this country.”

Political observers are watching this move closely and feel that this invitation has directly stemmed from Trinamool’s recent defeat in the Sagardighi bypoll which the Congress supported Left candidate won.

Questions, though, have already been raised on whether Banerjee’s formula would work in her own state where the Congress is already in an alliance with Trinamool’s arch rival, the CPI-M, and where the state leadership of the party have declared an aggressive political war against CM Banerjee and her policies.

“Wherever regional parties are strong, the BJP cannot fight in those places. These are places where people are demoralized and frustrated. There’s anti-incumbency and other factors at work. For instance in Karnataka, if you look at the verdict, it’s against the BJP government. People are antagonized. They considered the dispensation atrocious and terrible. The economy is ruined. Democratic rights are bulldozed. Even the wrestlers are not spared,” the Bengal Chief Minister said on Monday, explaining her stand.

“In this situation I feel those who are strong in their own places, in their respective regions, should fight in unity. For example in Bengal, I think we should fight here. In Delhi, for instance, the AAP should fight there. In Bihar Nitish Kumar and Tejaswi Yadav are already together and the Congress is also present. They should decide their formula, I can’t decide it for them. Similar methods should be followed in states like Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand and elsewhere. It’s their choice,” she added.

“In UP, of course, Akhilesh Yadav should be given that opportunity. There’s also Ajit Singh and there are different combinations in that state. I am not saying that the Congress should not fight there. Let’s decide this carefully. The talks are on and they have not reached final stages. We can talk about it in detail only when the matter is discussed threadbare,” Banerjee stated. “At this point, everybody is having their own thoughts about this move,” the Trinamool chief said.

LESSONS FOR BJP
Karnataka has voted for the Grand old Party exactly after a decade. In 2013, it won 122 seats with a 36 per cent vote share. On Saturday, the Congress won 135 seats and its ally, the Sarvodaya Karnataka Paksha, won the only seat it had contested. Collectively, the vote share was almost 43 per cent.

BJP’S ADVENT AND SUPREMACY IN KARNATAKA
The BJP had acquired the vacuum in Karnataka politics in the Nineties created by the implosion of the Janata Dal. However, in other southern states of the country, the anti-Congress area created was quickly taken up either by the communists, regional parties, and breakaway groups of the Congress — the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, the Telugu Desam (and later the YSR Congress and BRS) in Andhra Pradesh-Telangana, and the CPM.

The BJP’s rise in Karnataka was also boosted to a great extent thanks to the Lingayats, a powerful community that once backed the Congress and had also produced several chief ministers but later drifted apart from the Grand Old party during the early Eighties. BS Yediyurappa, a Lingayat strongman, had built the BJP brick by brick with the Lingayat community as its core vote.

IGNORING YEDIYURAPPA PROVED COSTLY?
Anybody remembers what happened in 2013? It was when the Saffron party lost Karnataka after being in power for a full five-year term. What led to the Saffron party’s debacle then was intense internal differences and row which also initiated the exit of Lingayat strongman BS Yediyurappa who had floated the Karnataka Janata Party (KJP).

The KJP may have had logged in a vote share under 10 per cent (9.79 per cent) and it had tasted victory in only six seats in the 224-member Assembly that year (in 2013), but this created a dent in the BJP’s fortunes in as many as 26 seats it had won in 2008 in the Lingayat belts, when the party went on to form its first government in south India!

History repeats itself as they say… again in 2023 Assembly polls. It may be recalled how the BJP eased out Yediyurappa “gradually” way back in 2021 though he did not leave the party nor did the party expel him this time, but side lining the Lingayat strongman was enough reason for the BJP’s defeat in at least around 10 seats in central Karnataka.

It should be noted that even as the Grand Old party did sweep the Assembly polls, the Saffron party’s score in the Lingayat stronghold was 31 out of 113 seats in 2023 as compared to 56 out of the 113, five years ago. Meanwhile, the Congress has gained from 50 to 78 in these strongholds.

Also, it must be mentioned here that the presence of around 10 Opposition candidates this time round who were Yediyurappa aides and were in the poll fray either from the Janata Dal (Secular) or the Congress or even as Independents after falling out of the BJP — they managed to deeply dent the BJP’s prospects. To establish this argument, it may be mentioned that a huge blow for the Saffron party was witnessed in Chikmagalur due to the Yediyurappa factor, where the BJP’s national general secretary CT Ravi was defeated by Congress candidate HD Thammaiah by a mere 5,926 votes. Thammaiah, a Lingayat, has been a close associate of Yediyurappa. He had left the BJP on the eve of the polls to join the Congress.

Analysing the debacle after the polls, BJP apparently felt that the Yediyurappa impact also played out at several constituencies with large numbers of voters belonging to the Lingayat community who rejected the party’s candidates even as the strongman Yediyurappa did not campaign for them.

Ahead of the 2013 elections, the BJP was faction-ridden too with loyalties aligned with Yediyurappa, BL Santhosh, Basavaraj Bommai and the BJP’s central leadership.

The BJP lost nearly 4 per cent of its vote share from 2018, when it won 104 seats, in the Lingayatdominated Hyderabad Karnataka, Mumbai Karnataka and the central Karnataka regions where Yediyurappa’s writ is heavily dominant. The BJP lost as many as 25 of the 56 seats it had won in these regions in 2018.

Also the Saffron party’s experimentation with fielding new candidates in 55 Assembly seats in the state yielded victories only in 13.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL

ROBIN ROY The writer is Senior Journalist and former Managing Editor, First India