In Hubli, Jagadish Shettar, former Chief Minister and six-term BJP MLA, recalls the telephone call from Delhi, when he was told that the party had decided that he would not be given a ticket in this Assembly election in Karnataka. “I served the party for the last 30 years. My family’s association with Jana Sangh goes back 50 years. I built the BJP in North Karnataka… They didn't give me any reason for denying the ticket. They hurt my self-respect”. Shettar’s omission is at the top of the list of changes in the BJP’s Karnataka list that don't seem inspired merely by the need to beat back anti-incumbency. Because “if anti-incumbency was the imperative, they would have changed only those candidates who were likely to lose”, points out Narayana A, who teaches in Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. Because tickets have also been denied to several candidates who seemed poised to win, like Shettar and Laxman Savadi. Shettar, now contesting on the Congress ticket, hints at a “hidden agenda” in his ouster from his former party: “After Yediyurappa, I was the senior-most Lingayat leader in the party. If I am finished…” The thinking in the BJP, he says, may be that “we should not depend on the Lingayat community”. He points to other high-profile Lingayat leaders like Savadi and UB Banakar who have left the BJP after being denied tickets on election eve. Shettar’s painting of a dramatic power shift in the BJP in this election may be exaggerated — and on point. On the surface, in a state where caste has a far more vivid and much more entrenched local life than Hindutva, the caste balance in the BJP list, by and large, looks undisturbed. But look below the surface, and there are consequential changes. Consider this: Shettar’s ticket has been given to the man known in these parts as Shettar’s “shishya”, party state general secretary Mahesh Tenginkai, who has worked in the BJP for nearly 30 years — both Shettar and Tenginkai share the same sub-caste, they are Banajiga Lingayats. Like in Hubbali, in Mysuru, too, the ticket has passed to a younger first-time candidate of the same community — four-time MLA and former minister SA Ramdas was denied the ticket which was given to BJP city president Srivatsa, both Brahmins. Even where, as in Udupi on the coastal belt, the BJP took away the ticket from its veteran Raghupathi Bhat and gave it to Yashpal Suvarna, a Hindutva firebrand of a different caste, the party ensured that, overall, in all five seats of the district, the caste balance was maintained — only individuals were changed, and their constituencies. In Shikaripura seat in Shivamogga, where Yeddiyurapa is not contesting this time, the ticket has gone to his son BY Vijayendra. The common factor in all the above instances is not a change of caste — it seems to be, instead, the passing of the baton to a younger generation. The bringing in of younger candidates, while keeping the caste balance intact, is being seen in Karnataka not just as a party turning its face to the future, but also, and perhaps more, as a reordering of the power equations between the state unit and the central party. The strategic sidelining of the seniors, it is being said, is to make way for a more docile Karnataka BJP, one arguably beholden to the high command and, therefore, more amenable to being “commanded” by it. In other words, the BJP’s list of candidates in Karnataka 2023 is being read in many quarters as Modi-Shah taking control of the party that Yediyurappa built. In Bengaluru, an RSS functionary, who does not want to be named, flags the changes in the BJP’s list as “the largest number of new faces so far in a single election in Karnataka”, and describes the relationship between state and central BJP as one between “mother and daughter”. “It’s not about control, the mother will guide the daughter”, he says. Shobha Karandlaje, Union Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmer Welfare, and campaign manager, says: “This time the tickets have been given keeping in mind the future and the need to build the party.” It is not that the BJP has not done this before. It has undertaken similar large-scale makeover exercises in other states. In Gujarat, most famously, 15 months ahead of the polls, it sacked the entire Vijay Rupani cabinet and brought in a new ministry. But the BJP’s changes in Karnataka come in a distinctive setting. Here, the BJP is not ringing out the old from a position of dominance, or to preserve its pole position. Here, it is, arguably, giving the state party’s reins more firmly to Modi to close a gap that has grown wider under his leadership. Since 1983, when it contested the Karnataka Assembly election for the first time, the BJP has been a rising force in the state but its performance in the Lok Sabha has raced ahead of its showing in the Vidhan Sabha polls — more so since 2014. In Mysuru, Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi, who teaches in KREA University, points out that “since 1999, in the last five Lok Sabha elections, the NDA has won three-fourths of Lok Sabha seats but in the same period the BJP has won only one-third of the Vidhan Sabha seats.” For instance, in the 1999 election, it won 25 per cent of the Lok Sabha seats and 19.64 per cent of the Assembly seats; and in 2019, it won 89.29 per cent of the Lok Sabha seats after winning 46.43 per cent of the Assembly seats in 2018. For the BJP, therefore, this may have seemed to be a good moment to try many things at once — test a new formula, make a generation change, while also increasing the control of the central party. In a more fundamental way, however, despite the change, the BJP remains caught in the circumstances of its birth and rise in Karnataka. The BJP built its base in the state in the 1990s, says Shobhi, at a time when both Congress and Janata Dal had become saturated and those who had made big money in mining and real estate were looking for political openings and opportunities. “Many of these people headed to the BJP. They brought with them a culture of making money and skirting the rules. They brought with them a substantive compromise of the notion of the ‘public good’. That is maybe why the BJP has not been able to project a Karnataka model, like its Gujarat Model.” Whether it wins this election or loses it, the BJP needs a change that runs deeper, he suggests, one that helps it not just to plug a gap, but to break a longer standstill.
