It is instructive to trace how the BJP emerged as a major player in Karnataka since 1991.
Despite evidence to the contrary, analysts often tend to believe that there are certain natural social and local constituencies that are unlikely to cosy up with a particular party. For long, it was believed that it would be difficult for the BJP to attract the “backward” castes or the OBCs. However, since the mid-1990s, large sections of OBCs have been supporting the party and have constituted the backbone of its “Hindu umbrella”. Of late, there has been much discussion on how the South is beyond the reach of the BJP. This ignores the long history of the BJP’s entry into Karnataka. In fact, Karnataka can be described as the party’s gateway to the South.
In 2019, the BJP swept Karnataka with more than half the voters voting for the party and winning 25 of the state’s 28 seats. That impressive performance indicated that the South was not as impenetrable for the BJP as its detractors might want to believe. The BJP’s 2019 performance was not an accident but the consolidation of a long-term trend. Even before the rise of Narendra Modi, the BJP had polled 42 per cent votes in the 2009 election with 19 seats. As Karnataka’s remaining Lok Sabha seats go to polls soon, this context should provide a useful backdrop to understand why this southern state is critical for the BJP. To perform on par with its 2019 tally nationally, it is imperative that the BJP repeats its 2019 feat despite sharing seats with JD(S). The continuation of BJP’s hold over large sections there would help it expand ideologically in a state outside of the Hindi heartland.
It is instructive to trace how the BJP emerged as a major player in Karnataka since 1991. Taking advantage of the chaos following the fall of the Janata Dal and riding on the Hindutva sentiment generated by the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, the BJP entered this southern state with almost 29 per cent vote share. In the decade that followed, the BJP was able to attract the Hegde faction of the Janata Dal. In fact, that alliance opened the southern doors for the BJP. Subsequently, the BJP has managed to do business with the faction opposed to Hegde, thus capturing the entire non-Congress space in the state. This has been a handsome outcome of the party’s strategy since the mid-1990s to enter into alliances with state-level players. By allowing them to gain power at the state level, the BJP not only entered many new states but also won new constituencies in them.
This model was initiated in Maharashtra in 1989-90 by allying with the Shiv Sena. State parties often misread their strength to keep the BJP at bay and lost in the process. In Karnataka too, its journey has been via the appropriation of the state-level party and its social base. It is not an accident that in the process, the state-level party gets trampled and the BJP emerges as the dominant player.
The BJP’s rise does not merely coincide with the unsettling of state-level party competition, but also the realignment of social forces in the state. In Karnataka, the BJP has captured the political loyalty of the Lingayat community for the past couple of decades. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that its success in the state is due only to that. As is the case elsewhere, the party has managed to bring into its fold a broader coalition of Hindu castes. This development seriously undermines the efforts of the Congress to benefit from the more complicated and diverse coalition of backward communities and minorities. As stated above, it would be a mistake to imagine that the backward communities are natural adversaries of the BJP. The BJP’s vote share of 51 per cent loudly proclaims to the contrary.
But we might be wrongly confining ourselves to the realm of realpolitik or what the BJP touts as smart politics if we overemphasise the BJP’s entry into a vacuum in the state and its “social engineering” — i.e., the shaping of new social coalitions. The BJP is doing that, but it is doing something much more significant and that holds the key to its entry into new territories. Starting with coastal Karnataka, the party has introduced aggressive Hindutva in order to create the Hindu umbrella — a social coalition that hinges on suspicion and villainising the imagined other. Over time, from the early aggressions by the Shree Ram Sena to the controversy over hijab in schools, the questions of competitive identity and Hindu assertion have been retained on the centre stage of state politics. This has allowed the BJP to garner votes from different sections of Hindu society and change the emotional and ideological landscape of the state.
As a corollary to this, the politics of the state has also witnessed the delinking of the Basava tradition from both Bhakti and reform. The BJP knows very well that in states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, the tradition of Bhakti was always historically aligned with projects of inclusion and reform. Therefore, it is necessary to reformulate that tradition, disconnecting it from its inclusive heritage and positing it as representing contemporary anxieties about identity and assertion. In an unlikely state like Karnataka, the BJP has emerged as a major player not merely due to the vagaries of competitive politics but equally — perhaps more — due to the restructuring of social relations and an intellectually violent encounter with tradition.
What Karnataka has experienced over the past three decades is thus a template that offers the BJP an entry point in state after state — irrespective of its location. If one remembers that BJP’s Karnataka experiment has borne fruit over a long period, we can see how state-level politics, national undercurrents and cultural interventions together usher in new politics. It is true that there are state specificities to both the structure of competition and localised patterns of social relations. But these don’t have permanence. While structures of competition are more transient, social relations, too, have a tendency of cracking and reconfiguring under militant interventions.
As this writer argued in the case of Maharashtra (The Mahayuti’s Dilemma, IE, April 18), the BJP’s political project — electorally and more so, culturally — cares the least about long-term social consequences. Given that, the BJP’s southern march through Karnataka (and as witnessed more recently, through Tamil Nadu), is bound to constitute a major element in its search for dominance with hegemony.
The writer, based in Pune, taught political science
