Karnataka election 2018: Can Modi wrest RSS' core territory from Congress?

Coastal Karnataka is an RSS stronghold which the Congress invaded with impunity in 2013

Undoubtedly, it is one of the most beautiful regions in the country. Whichever way you chose to traverse its landscape – hopping on passenger trains at one of those quaint little railway stations, driving through narrow roads winding through paddy fields, coconut groves gliding over pellucid streams, or hiking through inviting rain forests to catch a glimpse of the calm Arabian sea glistening in the sun – coastal Karnataka is a delight for the senses. This is also core Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) territory in the state. The region borders Kerala and the border is where the RSS ideology faces resistance from the Communists culminating in bloody consequences and political killings.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been focusing his energies on this coastal region, whose three Parliamentary constituencies – Uttara Kannada, Udupi-Chikamagulur and Dakshina Kannada – contain 24 Assembly constituencies. This may be a fraction of Karnataka’s 224 seats but at stake for Modi and his party would be pride. That’s because the Congress virtually decimated the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in this region in the 2013 Assembly elections. The BJP, riding high on the ‘Modi wave’, spectacularly reclaimed these Assembly segments in the 2014 Parliamentary elections.

In 2018, the party is unleashing even more firepower, with greater intensity. Modi is holding 21 rallies till May 9 across Karnataka, with many of them in this region. Modi is addressing a rally this evening in Mangaluru. The BJP has also parachuted Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in the state. At least three of the 11 towns where Yogi will address rallies are in this region.  

Ever since the BJP formed its first government at the centre, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee leading the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in 1998, there has been an upswing in the BJP’s share in the region. In the pre-Ram Janmabhoomi movement days, the Congress stamp of domination in the region was writ large. In 1989, the Congress won 15 of its 17 seats. Senior Congress leader M Veerappa Moily represented the Karkal constituency in Udupi district in 1989. The BJP had won just four seats in Karnataka in 1989 – not even one in the coastal region. But after the Ayodhya movement that catapulted the BJP into the national conscience and reinstated the RSS and its affiliates as the fountainheads of a reinvigorated ideological wave sweeping India, the party’s stock in the region rose in tandem with its growing representation across Karnataka. (See Graphics)

In 1994, the BJP increased its Karnataka tally 10 times over and also made a dent in the coastal region of the state, bagging five seats. These seats were won by the BJP in the face of a wave that brought the H D Deve Gowda-led Janata Dal (JD) to power in 1994. In 1999, the BJP won all but two of the six seats in Dakshina Kannada, even though the Congress defended its domination in the seats in adjoining Udupi district and Dakshina Kannada. It lost two seats in Uttara Kannada, including the communally sensitive Bhatkal, to the Congress. The BJP was emerging as an alternative to Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal, which was losing influence across the state.

It was in 2004 that the BJP stamped its authority on this RSS stronghold, winning 14 of the 18 seats in a fractured election that saw the party emerging as the winner but unable to form the government on its own. In the tumultuous five years of rule that followed this election, Karnataka saw three chief ministers from three different political parties and two separate spells of President’s rule. Despite the chaos, the BJP’s performance in coastal Karnataka was phenomenal. In Udupi, it completely dismantled the Congress, which won only one of the six it contested in the district. The BJP just about managed to retain its seats in the 2009 election, which also saw the first ever BJP government being set up in the state under the leadership of Lingayat leader B S Yeddyurappa. In 2013, a resurgent Congress reduced the BJP to its 1990s level. The BJP was virtually wiped out in Dakshina Kannada, where it managed to win only one reserved seat. In Udupi district, the Congress wrested back three seats from the BJP. In Uttara Kannada, too, the BJP managed to retain just one seat that it had won in the previous election.

All that changed in the 2014 Parliamentary election, in which the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) stormed to power across India. The BJP won 17 of the 28 Parliamentary seats in Karnataka. In a stunning reversal, the BJP virtually swept across the RSS bastion, riding on a ‘Modi wave’. A look at the Assembly-wise votes of each of the three Parliamentary constituencies suggests that the Congress won just one (Mangaluru) of the 24 constituencies in the region. That was 2014. This is 2018. Up next is 2019. As seasoned political pundits would confirm, Assembly elections are a different ball game altogether. And winning back this RSS stronghold from the Congress in an Assembly election could well be Modi’s redemption song in the land of Yakshagana.

Karnataka 2018 elections
Infogram