Aditi Phadnis: A full stop to Deve Gowda

PLAIN POLITICS

Deve Gowda has lost the trust of both Karnataka's minorities as well as the majority.

He's not going to like this but there is no kind way of saying it. HD Deve Gowda, former Prime Minister, eminence grise in Karnataka and humble farmer is history. A section of his clansmen, the Vokkaligas, might continue to vote for him. But neither the Muslims in Karnataka nor the lower castes""certainly not the Kurubas (shepherds), who were the principal elements in the social combination that brought him to power""are going to back him in the next election. Give it time. The HD Deve Gowda clan is going to become for Karnataka what Lalu Prasad was for Bihar, and for the same reasons.

Everyone knows that Deve Gowda's son Kumaraswamy is a figurehead chief minister. Kumaraswamy's mind (and mind-er) continues to be his father, who controls the party and the government through strategic placement of his several sons. One is a chief minister, another is in the cabinet, a third clears transfers and postings. When Kumaraswamy struck a deal with the BJP and became chief minister, Deve Gowda hesitated for precisely a week before abandoning the Congress and joining his son in a formation he had vowed to oppose during the election campaign. So his credibility with the Muslims is zero.

The immediate justification Gowda gave was the Congress's overtures to his colleague Siddaramaiah, a Kuruba with a considerable following in the Mysore-Mandya region. Siddaramiah said Gowda had promised him chief ministership. The break came eight months ago, when Siddaramiah collected enough MLAs to walk out of the Deve Gowda government altogether.

For the Kurubas, denied chief ministership thrice (Kolluru Mallappa and D K Naikar came close to becoming chief minister in 1970 and 1987, respectively) this was the third insult. Right now, Gowda can't find a candidate to field against Siddaramiah in Chamundeswari, the seat that Siddaramiah held, vacated and is going to contest again. If Gowda's candidate loses, it's the beginning of the end for the family.

But the lawlessness in Karnataka, the absence of infrastructural development, the general decrepitude ... how did this happen? How could Karnataka, which presented a revenue surplus of Rs 1,500 crore in the 2006-07 budget, achieve so little infrastructural growth? You cannot blame either the current chief minister or his father alone for the mess""the Congress must own up to a sizeable share.

The Congress in Karnataka has suffered two crippling blows in recent history. The first came when Rajiv Gandhi sacked Veerendra Patil, an important Lingayat leader, from chief ministership in 1991, admittedly after Patil suffered a stroke and could not govern. But after Ramakrishna Hegde joined the BJP alliance and JH Patel died, members of the former Janata Party/Janata Dal had only two options: they could either join Deve Gowda or the Congress "" the BJP was a non-option.

They joined the Congress in droves and this, arguably, was the second blow. The central Congress party welcomed them, ignoring the sparks of rebellion in the Karnataka unit. Whether it was Ramesh Kumar or RL Jalappa, they stormed into the Congress, upsetting the well-ordered caste coalition and hierarchy inside the party. They reckoned they could radicalise the party, turning it into a vehicle for their own ambition. The party itself was slow to realise that the Congress-Socialist marriage was an imperfect integration. The new entrants got to work quickly. They got the Dharam Singh-led Congress government sacked in the belief that they would get better play with some other individual as chief minister. That the Singh government was ineffectual is another matter.

They hadn't reckoned on the fact that Deve Gowda, having been one of them till recently, knew all the moves. BJP leader Yediyurappa and Kumaraswamy were already working on a deal with the tacit consent of Deve Gowda. The so-called ginger group in the Congress thought they could use the party. Instead, they got the party to lose the government altogether. Thus, the one thing that the Congress could have prided itself on""keeping the BJP out ""was thrown out with the bathwater.

There's more to this shaming story. After being relegated to the Opposition, the same Congress leaders responsible for destabilising the government tried to "expose" the Deve Gowda-BJP government by releasing tapes that showed corruption in land deals. The government proved that the incident could not have been taped when it was supposed to have been. As they were released to just one news channel, they were dismissed as being fraudulent, causing red faces in the Party. As there are many in the Congress who, even now, believe the party would have been better off supporting Deve Gowda, they are not in favour of destabilising him or his family too much.

As long as the Congress in Karnataka remains rudderless and faction-ridden, Deve Gowda and his family will continue to run rings round it. There is another deeply sinister element in this. The Muslims in Karnataka today have no option to back the Congress. But could they be blamed for opting to be led by clerics? Expect more communal incidents like Chikmagalur, Mysore and Mangalore to occur. All the incidents had local support. And the Congress continues to do nothing to prevent deeper communalisation. Messrs Deve Gowda might be punctuation marks in the political history of Karnataka. But it is the Congress that must own up to the responsibility of marring the state's fortunes. What has Karnataka done to deserve such a terrible punishment?