God and Gowda

The political convulsions in Karnataka underline, yet again, the apparent foolhardiness of ordering Indian politics around the secular-communal faultline. For one, in a country as diverse as India, there are numerous and cross-cutting cleavages. In a given moment, one of them might appear to be outstanding, but it is futile to expect its dominance to hold as circumstances change. Also, more than five decades after Independence, and almost a decade and a half after the BJP8217;s Ayodhya campaign issued its strident challenge, the very notion of secularism remains unclear. If you8217;ve been watching the frank turnabout of the Janata Dal Secular in Karnataka 8212; here, a major section of that party has gone against its name and professed ideology and announced its intent to cohabit in power with the declared enemy, the BJP 8212; you might even suspect that this lack of clarity on secularism is wholly deliberate. In a coalition age, it keeps alive the endless variety of political combinations.

Twenty months ago, Deve Gowda8217;s JDS allied with the Congress to keep the 8216;8216;communal8217;8217; BJP, which was the single largest party in the assembly, from forming a government in the southern state. As the son leads most of his father8217;s party into the BJP8217;s gleeful embrace now, the reasons are to be plotted in the fluctuations in the always-uneasy Gowda-Congress equation. Gowda8217;s been openly sulking in the partnership, Bangalore8217;s IT industry has had to bear the brunt. The Congress, in turn, made the relationship even rockier by first encouraging Gowda8217;s lieutenant, Siddaramaiah, to revolt and then by playing footsie with the breakaway faction 8212; a strategy Gowda rightly read as an unfriendly move to divide his own backward base. The present denouement was foretold, then, given that Gowda8217;s party hasn8217;t a political agenda larger than Gowda.

As the Congress-led Dharam Singh government teeters on the brink, there8217;s a lesson for the Congress too. The developments in Karnataka have again revealed the party8217;s sheer lack of finesse in managing power-sharing arrangements. The party may have shed its aversion to coalitions as a matter of pragmatic strategy, but it has failed to imbibe the culture of give and take that they demand. Congress hauteur, so tellingly framed in that recent tableau of Deve Gowda8217;s fruitless wait in the capital for an audience with 10 Janpath, is at odds with its will to power.