The Express View on Karnataka election: Bengaluru sends a message

For the Congress, this vote of confidence in a state where it boasts of a distinctive leadership and robust organisation, and a broad social coalition it can call its own, where its recent record in governance has insulated it from the withering that has afflicted it in other states, will deservedly lift sagging spirits.

It was also at the right place at the right time — anti-incumbency had mounted against the unremarkable Basavaraj Bommai government and all of the BJP’s last-minute Hindutva overplay and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s electioneering blitzkrieg could not make it go away. With the third force, the JD(S), not fully holding up in the end, the Congress was the gainer. And yet, it was more than just that.

The Congress’s unambiguous victory shows that when the party rouses itself on the ground and its leaders rally together for the fight — as opposed to simply blaming the people or merely waiting for the opponent’s supposedly inevitable decline — it can still win. To the victor, the Karnataka outcome drives home an important message: The onus of victory is on it.

For the BJP, too, there are lessons writ large on the Karnataka wall. First, it must account for the blank space in the voter imagination where the state government should have been. By all accounts, the Basavaraj Bommai government was either absent, or registered a negative presence in the life of the people. “Anti-incumbency” is not an iron law of political nature — several governments, including those led by the BJP, have returned to power in recent times.

In Karnataka, anti-incumbency was made of issues that were real and throbbing. The Bommai government was seen to have taken corruption to new levels, and it was perceived as a non-starter on other issues of public concern such as price rise and creation of jobs.

The BJP may have hoped that, while it tried to remake its state unit in the mould of the central party, it would fill in the blanks by wielding Hindutva, and unleashing the campaign of PM Modi. Both calculations hit a wall — the first because the BJP’s homogenising project stumbled over diversities on the Karnataka ground and could not flatten its vivid and deeply entrenched local cultures dominated by caste.

The second, because PM Modi only seemed to help strengthen the BJP where it was already strong — in other areas, he was not enough. He could not bridge the distance in yet other places between support for the Central government and apathy/antipathy towards the state BJP.

The 2024 contest has just acquired a new frisson of unpredictability — in a democracy, that is good news. The Karnataka verdict is a vote against hubris and complacency. The BJP must look again at its template, its fit or lack of it with local topographies. And the Congress must know that the Karnataka victory need not mean that the tide has turned – it needs to build on the work it has done.