After Yeddyurappa

Bookanakere Siddalingappa Yeddyurappa trashed all norms of propriety so consistently to extend his tenure as chief minister of Karnataka that his quibbling over details of the Lokayukta report on mining in the state appears beside the point. The untenability of his incumbency had become clear long before. The report,all 25,228 pages of it,must of course be read purposefully,and the response at various levels should kickstart the process of sorting out many important questions especially on how to regulate extractive sectors like mining and on the role of the Lokayukta in the wider investigative framework. For now,however,the BJPs political energies will be concentrated on getting past the unseemliness that has attached itself to regime change in Bangalore.

On Thursday,the BJP Parliamentary Board finally asked Yeddyurappa to step down. The decisiveness albeit belated in that move comes,in part,from the partys obvious discomfiture over the shadow the Karnataka mess is casting on its shrill anti-corruption mobilisation in New Delhi. Coasting on civil society agitations over the Lokpal bill,it has made it a practice to reflexively demand the immediate resignation of anybody in the UPA government whose name is mentioned even in passing in a corruption allegation. The laboured defence of Yeddyurappa whos courted controversy on possible complicity in land allotments therefore has its rousing words about propriety flung right back at the party,besides highlighting its double standards on the role of an anti-corruption ombudsman. The regime change in Bangalore,therefore,offers the BJP a big moment to retrieve clarity.

That clarity,however,will not be so easily won. Ever since the BJP installed its first single-party government in a southern state,the effort to maintain stability has become an excuse to tangle up all lines of accountability most notably,on the Reddy brothers of Bellary. That tolerance of expediency also allowed the Yeddyurappa government to be constructed as a balance of countervailing political factions. The successor government to Yeddyurappas will find it difficult to pull along in his opaque manner,not least because the light has been shone yet again on the need to clean up the mining sector. Besides,amidst the lobbying that is now come into the open,the challenge before the BJP will be to provide clarity on whose writ it is that runs in the state. Establishing it is important not only for political stability,but also for the more important task of bringing coherence and accountability to governance in Karnataka.