Shuffle kerfuffle

The BJP government in Karnataka faces the abyss,as over 20 MLAs,including some ministers,turned on it and withdrew support. The Yeddyurappa government is straining every nerve to cajole and lure MLAs back,and save its hairsbreadth majority in the house.

Its a tense moment,certainly,but they had it coming. Yeddyurappas recent cabinet reshuffle was a fraught affair,with the chief minister using the occasion to reassert his authority. After the Bellary mining barons showed him who was boss last November by engineering a wave of dissension,he had been forced to toe their line and rearrange his cabinet. In the last reshuffle,he tried to undo that humiliation,bringing back their bete noire Shobha Karandlaje,for instance. But the problem runs deeper: the clash of ambition between the partys core group and the independents whom the BJP has wooed over now seems harder to contain. Karnataka carries great symbolic weight for the BJP it is the first state in the South that the party has captured,after laborious effort. But as long as its magic potion remains the spoils of office rather than the persuasiveness of good governance,its hold will remain precarious. And this is equally true for the Congress and the JDS,whose grip on their own party leaders is just as shaky. Even now,the extent of the BJPs trouble is unclear and in flux,as the MLAs who withdrew support suddenly turn around to profess full faith in the government.

The ease with which legislators can be persuaded to shift parties is the big,distorting factor in the state. Karnatakas politics boils with money. Its legislators are fickle,used to picking party allegiances on the basis of inducements of patronage that make some of the countrys biggest political scandals look paltry in scale. The tentacles of powerful mining and real estate interests snake into every major party. Conflicts of interest have flooded the system with so much cash that it is crucial to restore balance.