Aditi Phadnis: Repent at leisure

PLAIN POLITICS

Haradanahalli Doddegowda Deve Gowda must sleep easy now. He's got his revenge at last. During the unstable politics of 1996-98, Congress President Sitaram Kesri found that though he was the president of the Congress propping up the United Front (UF) government, the UF prime Minister H D Deve Gowda would virtually ignore him, talking over his head to (by then) former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao.

Kesri put up with this for a few months but finally got so enraged that he virtually issued a fiat "" either the UF had to change its PM or that was the end of Congress support to the coalition. Thus, Deve Gowda was forced out of the prime ministership (after being the fourth choice of the United Front) and I K Gujral took over.

Now, Gowda has got his own back on the Congress. Getting his son to do a deal with the BJP, Gowda is smiling smugly. "What can you do with this younger generation?" he seems to say mournfully to his Congress colleagues "It has a mind of its own". But it is also true that Gowda is in the enviable position of having his cake and eating it too.

The current spectacle in Karnataka "" of numbers congregating to form a government any which way "" cannot be called politics. When the Karnataka Assembly elections were held in 2004, Deve Gowda swore he would never let down his Muslim voters and form an alliance with the BJP. He has allowed his son to do precisely that. The Janata Dal-Secular is now the official partner of the BJP "" also secular, it is to be supposed. Nothing but an accident or the next round of Assembly elections can dislodge this combine now.

The fact is that it has been Gowda's ambition these past 10 or 15 years to settle his son as the chief minister of Karnataka. In his party there was a line-up of politicians "" M P Prakash, P G R Sindhia and Siddaramiah "" who he could not have bypassed to give the job to his son in his lifetime. Now, Kumaraswamy has the post, courtesy Papa.

The Congress doesn't seem to care. MLAs from Karnataka who know the exploits of H D Deve Gowda and family repeatedly told the party high command after the Assembly elections that it would be a mistake for the party to tie up with him. There were good reasons for this. While Deve Gowda was known all over the state, his presence was confined to the Hassan-Mandya belt of the state. He must be contained, not allowed to consolidate, was the argument.

The party gave a counter-argument. The BJP had to be kept out at all costs. That Congress had no choice but to tie-up with Gowda if this was to be achieved. If that was the case, shouldn't the Congress have forged an ideological basis for aligning with Messers Gowda that strengthened the combination's secular base? Some visionary Congress politicians even suggested to party President Sonia Gandhi that if Gowda suddenly pulled out from the government, he would lose nothing. It would be the Congress that would be tainted from contact with a political grouping that was totally unscrupulous.

In all of this, find it in your heart to sympathise with Chief Minister Dharam Singh's predicament. Never a charismatic administrator, he had to tactfully manage Deve Gowda's backseat driving of the government, including decisions like who should be kept in the Cabinet and who should be thrown out. Dharam Singh had to sack his Deputy Chief Minister Siddaramiah because the Gowda clan suddenly developed an aversion to him. On the other hand, he had to fight off the more subtle machinations of Deve Gowda's Permanent Enemy Number One, S M Krishna. Also Vokkaliga, Krishna felt impelled to safeguard his standing in his caste constituency and got his supporter Mallikarjuna Kharge appointed to the presidentship of the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) because he simply didn't trust Dharam Singh's handling of Gowda. Dharam Singh learnt from the newspapers that a new KPCC chief had been appointed. A caucus of Krishna's supporters cursed Deve Gowda (and Dharam Singh, by implication) day in and day out. At a party rally at Kolar a few months ago, for instance, R L Jalappa, a Krishna acolyte, gave an account of the government's decisions and roared: "Do you really want this government to continue ?" Clearly, here was one Congressman who wanted the government to fall.

It was this group that propped up Siddaramiah when he launched on a collision course with Gowda. Siddaramaiah belongs to the Kuruba caste, a backward caste that is 8 per cent of Karnataka's population. When Siddaramaiah's diatribe against Gowda got strident and verged on the personal, Gowda threw down the gauntlet before Dharam Singh: get Siddaramiah out or else. He was thrown out of the party for anti-party activities. But H D Kumaraswamy continues to be in Janata Dal-S, despite defying the President of the party!

All this wouldn't have mattered if the government had performed. It didn't, leading to bogus controversies about whether rural Karnataka had been overlooked and the IT industry favoured. Gowda's famous standoff with N R Narayan Murthy was the logical but absurd culmination of the debate that should never have been allowed to take off.

So what happens now ? Gowda has achieved what he wanted through a brilliant stratagem. The Congress is compromised. His son is going to be the chief minister. And it is H D Deve Gowda, armed with his ultimate victory over the Congress, who will run the government in Karnataka. In the future, this could be the script for greater BJP-Janata Dal S collaboration in the centre. If only the central Congress Party had listened.