BJP’s defeat in Karnataka shows a challenge has finally been mounted to Modi’s shock and awe tactics

BS Yeddyurappa’s decision to resign as chief minister before taking the floor test in the Karnataka Assembly shows the limits of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s concept of power. Its goal is to establish his complete domination over Indian politics, based on the tactics of shock and awe. It is because of Modi’s propensity to display overwhelming power, his inexhaustible capacity to impose his will on others that few thought the Bharatiya Janata Party would not be able to form the government once it emerged as the largest party in Karnataka, just eight seats short of the majority.

Modi’s shock and awe tactics seek to disorient the Opposition, which consequently succumbs to his will because it has come to believe he will win and have his way. If the BJP stumbled in Karnataka, it is because the judiciary set aside the 15-day period that Governor Vejubhai Vala had given to Yeddyurappa to prove his majority. His task of enticing eight members within 24 hours of the Supreme Court asking him to prove his majority was just not possible, not even with Modi’s barely concealed wish to gift one more state to his party.

Apart from relying on the institutional pushback against Modi’s concept of power, in which political morality has little salience, the Opposition has come to realise that the best away to counter his will, and ascendancy, is to unite and pool resources. Though both the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) campaigned viciously against each other during the election, they realised that the BJP behemoth was a danger to their very existence. It spurred them to strike a deal without delay.

The deal was not just a function of both parties wishing to grab power. It was more a survival strategy against Modi seeking to shrink Opposition space. They felt that ahead of the 2019 general election the BJP in Karnataka would discredit them, through methods foul and fair, to improve upon the 17 Lok Sabha seats the party won in 2014. Count the number of Opposition leaders who have been raided or have had allegations of corruption flung against them.

Indeed, a consensus is emerging within the Opposition that there is a need to stop Modi from acquiring overwhelming power to awe them, and also Indian voters who tend to believe a supreme leader possesses magical qualities to transform their lives. This is why Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao offered police protection to the Karnataka MLAs who were whisked away to his state by the Congress. And to think Rao’s Telangana Rashtriya Samithi will cross swords with the Congress in 2019.

Likewise, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu offered both the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) a safe haven to keep their MLAs from being poached by the BJP. Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party and the Congress are rivals in the state. Naidu, Rao and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee reportedly also counseled HD Kumaraswamy not to betray the cause of secularism his father, former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda, claims to hold dear.

Signal to institutions

Indeed, the secularism-Hindutva binary could not have acquired such significance had all these leaders not feared Modi dwarfing them. After all, Naidu was with the BJP until March. It is to counter Modi that there is a concerted attempt to build a rainbow alliance that could act as a bulwark against the prime minister’s strategy of striking terror in the Opposition.

It is not just about preventing Modi from acquiring overwhelming power, but also what he does with it. There are two states that Modi feels he should have won – Delhi and Bihar. Instead of reconciling with his defeat, he has ensured that the Aam Aadmi Party government remains paralysed through the lieutenant governor’s exercise of veto power. In Bihar, Modi split the Grand Alliance, won over Nitish Kumar to his side and formed a coalition government with his party.

Given this backdrop, Karnataka will likely have aroused Modi’s instinct for power. He will either seek to drive a wedge into the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) coalition or create myriad administrative problems for it, including the Sangh Parivar keeping the communal cauldron simmering.

That Modi does not respect the rules of the game became evident in Goa. The BJP won 13 seats against the Congress’s 17, yet won over other parties to form the government. In Manipur too, the BJP was seven seats behind the Congress but engineered defections to form the government. It had just two MLAs in Meghalaya, but used the Centre’s incredible clout in the North East to deny power to the Congress.

All these instances where the largest party, the Congress, was not called to form a government rendered hypocritical the BJP’s claim that it must have a first shy at power in Karnataka. It was arguably a compelling factor for the Supreme Court to order the BJP to seek a vote of confidence within 24 hours of the Congress requesting it to intervene in Karnataka.

This is not to say the Modi government has kept away from trying to influence the Supreme Court. In August 2014, barely three after taking power, the government appointed former Chief Justice of India P Sathasivam as Kerala’s governor. In a controversial judgement dismissing the appeal of Bajrang Dal leader Dara Singh, convicted for killing the Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two children, Sathasivam had articulated Hindutva’s views on religious conversion. His remark was subsequently expunged by the Supreme Court. Sathasivam had also quashed a second FIR filed against BJP chief Amit Shah in the fake encounter case of Tulsiram Prajapati.

Sathasivam’s appointment as governor was construed as a signal to judges that they will be awarded for delivering judgements reflecting the BJP’s ideology and favouring its interests. The government’s alleged interference in the functioning of the judiciary even prompted four seniormost judges of the Supreme Court to hold an unprecedented press conference in February asking people to save democracy, so to speak. A vigorous signaling to the judiciary is designed into the Modi government’s refusal to promote to the Supreme Court Justice KM Joseph, who squashed the BJP’s ambition to form a government in Uttarakhand in 2016.

The Supreme Court’s role in nipping the BJP’s quest for power in Karnataka should also be an inspiration to the bureaucracy, which the Modi government believes should be committed to it. For instance, RK Raghavan, who headed the Special Investigation Team that exonerated Modi of any involvement in the 2002 Gujarat carnage, was appointed India’s High Commissioner to Cyprus. A member of the team, YC Modi, was appointed head of the National Investigation Agency. His appointment has been followed by the acquittal of several accused in what are known as the Hindutva terror cases.

Regional power dynamics

Modi and the BJP, however, are likely to think they have done nothing that the Congress did not do in its heyday. For instance, the world’s first elected communist government, in Kerala, was unjustifiably dismissed in 1959. The Congress introduced the culture of Aya Ram Gaya Ram, shorthand for engineering defections. In 1980, Bhajan Lal, then chief minister of Haryana, merged his party with the Congress to survive the dismissal of non-Congress state governments after Indira Gandhi rode back to power in 1980.

All these undemocratic manoeuverings paled into insignificance when the Telugu Desam Party government of NT Rama Rao was dismissed on August 15, 1984 even as he was recovering from heart surgery. The pretext was that he had lost the majority. Rao brought his MLAs to Rashtrapati Bhavan to belie the Congress claims, and guarded his flock for a month before he was re-installed as the chief minister. Then, too, the Opposition had sunk their differences to support Rao.

Months later, Indira Gandhi was assassinated and the Congress, riding a sympathy wave, wiped out the Opposition in most states. But not in Andhra Pradesh, where the Telugu Desam Party under Rao won 30 of the 42 seats to emerge as the principal Opposition party in the Lok Sabha, becoming the first regional party to have this honour.

The story of Rao shows that people tend to recoil not so much at a leader’s acquisition of extreme power, as Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi certainly possessed, but at its gross misuse. It was precisely why Indira Gandhi and the Congress were routed in the 1977 election, which was held after the Emergency was lifted.

More significantly, regional parties have multiplied since the 1980s, and they are averse to a national party or leader dominating them. Because no party mustered a majority from 1989 to 2014 at the Centre, regional parties, and their social bases, became accustomed to their independence and autonomy of action which they do not wish to lose to a leader whose appetite for absolute power is insatiable. Karnataka should tell Modi that a challenge to his concept of power has been mounted.

Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi.