Bangalore: If state elections in Karnataka were to be held tomorrow, there appears to be little doubt that the Congress party under the leadership of Siddaramaiah would emerge with the highest vote share. Not because the Congress party is more prepared organisationally for the elections, or even that its performance in the government in the last five years has been so exemplary that voters would give it a resounding return mandate. A great part of its victory would lie in the disarray of the opposition parties and their poor credit-worthiness, politically speaking, in the eyes of the electorate.

Where BJP stands

Consider the legacy issues that these parties must contend with as they face the electorate. In the case of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the spectacular mix of high-level corruption allegations and inquiries, sex and sleaze scandals, communally-polarising policy action and moral policing outrages that its government in the short span of five years (2008-2013) acquired notoriety for, still rankles in public memory.

Its chief ministerial candidate B.S. Yeddyurappa, though legally cleared of corruption charges that had led to his arrest in 2011, is today a much diminished man. His own party leader in a recent press conference suffered a damning Freudian slip, calling his government (2008-2013) as the “most corrupt” Karnataka has seen. He quickly corrected himself, but the irony was not lost on those present and in the social media universe.

The party has given tickets to a contingent of former ministers accused of corruption, bribery and even rape. All of them were later acquitted by the courts, no doubt, but their names are rarely taken, especially by the media, without that killer qualifier “tainted”.

Katta Subramanya Naidu, Krishnaiah Setty, the infamous mining baron G. Janardhana Reddy’s brother G. Somashekara Reddy (who was accused of bribing a judge) and M.P. Renukacharya, once accused of sexually harassing a nurse but then let off when the victim withdrew the charges, all appear in the first two BJP lists, as do two of the three former BJP ministers, C.C. Patil and Laxman Savadi, who were caught on camera watching a pornographic clip in the assembly. The full list will tell us if the third man in this infamous trio, Krishna Palemar, has also been accommodated.

Issues facing JD(S)

The other opposition party, the Janata Dal (Secular), faces more complex issues of identity and ideological mooring. The party, which by right should have inherited Karnataka’s long and productive experiment with centrist politics and governance, has today become a sub-regional, caste-based, family-dominated party.

The decline of the JD(S) indeed points to the attenuation of Karnataka’s once rich political fabric. After all, it was in Karnataka that the Janata Dal, as a non-Congress and non-BJP political formation with avowed secular credentials, took birth. Despite its tendency for fragmentation, the JD and/or its offshoots soon became a force in regional Indian politics. In Karnataka, it remained a credible player in state politics through the 1980s and 1990s, holding out as a cohesive unit long after the mother formation splintered elsewhere.

The party leveraged the support of the state’s dominant-caste blocs, though it was never radical enough to disengage from the strong social and economic foundation of caste itself. It won over a sizeable section of the minority and Dalit vote that had at one time gone solidly to the Congress party. The JD(S), however, squandered this legacy. Its claim to secular politics was tarnished by the indelible ink of association with the BJP.

The opportunist alliance struck between its leader H.D. Kumaraswamy and Yeddyurappa of the BJP in 2006 remains problematic till today in the public eye. There is still a sense that this could happen again after the elections if the electoral arithmetic of a hung assembly so dictates. Though reports from the ground in areas of JD(S) strength suggest some degree of popular resurgence, there is little internal introspection on its future course – except perhaps in the mind of its senior leader and a founding participant of the original Janata Dal, the former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, who opposed the alliance with the BJP in 2006, and continues to rue it even today.

The problems that beset the opposition have doubtless bolstered the position of the Congress, although the latter’s gains have not come entirely by default. Its leader Siddaramaiah has been the party’s biggest asset. Unintimidated by the shots and slings of the BJP’s election machinery, he responds to allegations with facts, frequently exposing the communal undertow of these attacks. Some of his decisions – according Lingayats the status of a minority religious community, or the more dubious demand for a separate Karnataka flag – have finessed the opposition, especially the BJP, and will likely bring the Congress some electoral dividends, although their long-term social and political implications are less clear.

Congress's appeal

But these do not constitute the Congress party’s central appeal in these assembly elections. That appeal will rest on the concrete and quantifiable policy outcomes of the anti-poverty and anti-hunger schemes that were introduced by the Siddaramaiah government.

Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, and a frequent campaigner for the BJP, said in an election speech that the Congress party had taken the state developmentally backward by five years. A recent analysis, in trying to quantify the performance of Siddaramaiah’s government on major economic and developmental indices, argued that the state’s strict compliance to fiscal discipline affected its social sector spending adversely.

The article in Mint claims that in 2017-18 (BE), Karnataka spent only 11% of its aggregate expenditure on education and 3.8% on medical and public health and family welfare, which was amongst the lowest state-level allocations on these sectors in the country.

State party president Dinesh Gundu Rao agrees that outlays on health and education could have been better and must be increased. But he points to the slew of social welfare schemes started by the Siddaramaiah government that have directly provisioned the rural and urban poor, school children and other vulnerable sections like Schedule Castes and Tribes, and pregnant and lactating mothers.

“Some of the important schemes for food security have had an huge impact. Like Anna Bhagya, which has received recognition for its success and has had a big reach – benefitting around 1.10 crore families,” Gundu Rao told The Wire.

Announced by the chief minister in 2013, the Anna Bhagya scheme originally provided five kilograms of rice per person to below poverty line families at Re 1 per kg. Two years later, this provision was made free of cost with allocations going up to seven kilograms per person. It was later extended to above poverty line families, at higher, though still subsidised rates. The government claims the scheme has benefitted 1.07 crore families, constituting two-thirds of the state’s four crore population.

The Ksheera Bhagya scheme, under which children are given 150 ml of milk free of cost thrice a week; the re-introduction of eggs, six times a week, into the mid-day meal for anganwadi children; the launch of Mathru Poorna, a scheme to provide a nutritional meal (it includes a boiled egg and 120 ml of milk) at Rs 20 for pregnant and lactating mothers; and other welfare schemes have directly targeted hunger and malnutrition. The literature on the schemes, including some independent evaluations of their impact, make the point that despite all the problems of quality, reach and leakages, the schemes have been widely welcomed by beneficiaries and have positively impacted their lives.

Early predictions on election outcomes have been known to be remarkably risky in Indian elections. The relative standing of the parties may well change in the three weeks leading up to the actual vote on May 12 owing to a variety of reasons. There are tendencies, tensions and contradictions that lie simmering and unarticulated just below the surface that push themselves into the open towards the end of the campaign.

There is always the possibility of an unforeseen but overriding issue emerging that could upset all calculations. And there are other imponderables. For example, the extent to which illegal money will play out in these elections, and what its sources are. Perhaps BJP president Amit Shah’s famous booth-level operations to sew up voter support may find some success, or Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s proposed blitzkrieg of the state a week before elections sway votes. We don’t know, yet. This is only an attempt to offer aspects of the big picture, the current state-of-play, where political parties have positioned themselves and why. Meaningful predictions on election outcomes however must wait.

Parvathi Menon is an independent journalist and writer.

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