Will Siddaramaiah Need A Plan B?

Banking on fault lines to wrench open a divided Gowda family may be the chief minister’s fallback option.

- Barkha Dutt

As a north Indian driving through south Karnataka, I am struck by how clean and uncluttered it is. We make our way past grape farms and coconut palms on roads that are as soft as butter, even in the most interior and remote villages. We are traveling in a territory dominated by the Janata Dal Secular [JD(S)], former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda’s party. The fields are ablaze; the summer temperatures and the political weather make for some heated arguments under the watchful and menacing eye of the dhristi bommai, the talisman that is the local equivalent of a scarecrow and is meant to ward off evil.

This is the Vokkaliga—Gowda’s community—heartland, and amid murmurs of how the JD(S) can tip the scales in the case of a hung assembly, we line up to listen to the former prime minister speak. Spotting us in the audience, the man who famously described himself as a “humble farmer” deftly switches from Kannada to English for a few minutes. He uses that time to drive home to the people, many of them Muslims, that the suggestion that his party could join hands with the BJP is a “Congress canard” spread by Ghulam Nabi Azad. Curiously, he brings up the 2002 Gujarat riots and demands to know, “Where were all the secularists then?”