On self-destruct mode

Karnataka Chief Minister J.H. Patel has never been free from a threat to the stability of his government with a wafer-thin majority. It w...

Karnataka Chief Minister J.H. Patel has never been free from a threat to the stability of his government with a wafer-thin majority. It was Union Commerce Minister Ramakrishna Hegde’s men who raised the standard of revolt nine months ago. It is former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda’s faithful flock that is now defying the Chief Minister.

Patel is, of course, a politician of proven survival skills. But he had it easier in January. The anti-defection law attenuated the defiance then of the seven Janata Dal legislators, who desisted from joining Hegde’s Lok Shakti and have been content to continue in the avowedly apolitical Rashtriya Navanirman Vedike, more a thorn in Patel’s side than a serious challenge to him.

Gowda’s 42-MLA gang, which has risen in revolt with a memorandum against the Chief Minister, is a different proposition altogether. Menacingly, they number more than a third of the 109 members of the ruling party in the 224-strong State Assembly. Repeated promises of no harm intended to thegovernment cannot, in a such a context, reassure the man at its helm. Certainly not when these come from a leader who showed a distinct preference for provincial politics and power, even while presiding over the liquidation (or at least the launch of the process) of the Dal-headed

Patel can still, conceivably, stave off the crisis. There are tricks in and out of the book that can still be tried before the scheduled JD Legislature Party meeting of October 28. The demands for dissolution of the Assembly and fresh elections can help to contain disaffection from spreading further in the ranks of the state Dal. Survival in power, however, is not going to cease to be a struggle for Patel.

The import of the Karnataka events is not to be seen in an individual political career. What is being witnessed in the state is the crumbling of the last surviving bastion of the Dal and the kind of politics it has symbolised. Coming in the wake of the collapse of its other, erstwhile stronghold in Bihar, it cannot but deal aheavy, possibly even lethal, blow to what is left of the Dal at the national level. Bihar has already created an unbridgeable gulf between Dal groups on Article 356, and Karnataka can indeed carry the conflict forward to a familiar point: few other political forces or formations have shown the Dal’s capacity to divide and multiply.