Saffron Knights

It was a state with a strong anti-north politics. But Karnataka now opens the doors to the south for the BJP—giving a fillip to its 2019 prospects.

- Bhavna Vij-Aurora

CROSSING the Vindhyas. It’s an age-old metaphor, one that has defined India’s power matrix for centuries, and a vital one for the BJP to clinch. Karnataka, after all, was the last major election in the south before the curtains go up for the big one in 2019. Next summer’s general elections—if they do not get preponed—have all the signs of an epoch-making one, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi needed to show he could lead his chariot beyond ‘Aryavarta’. The BJP will need to offset potential losses in the north with a compensatory harvest in new territories—that’s the general consensus. No wonder he was exultant about the red loam soils of this Deccan state getting that glint of saffron.

The dizzying rollercoaster that began with unusually heavy footfalls at the polling booths on Saturday—and carried on well after a T20like cliffhanger on Tuesday—seemed nowhere close to ending as we go to press. Triumphal tweets were being sent and deleted, MLAs being carted back and forth between Eagleton Golf Resort and the Governor’s bungalow, jokes proliferating on Whatsapp and Twitter, and legal briefs with arcane constitutional points being drafted on both sides.

All this breathless confusion owes to the fact, of course, that the lotus did not bloom in as much profusion as the party czars would have liked. But the precise path the tortuous script takes is immaterial in a sense. What’s key, in the run-up to a Lok Sabha election that looks more open now, is that the BJP has taken one more step to shed the image of a “north Indian party”. What’s more, it did that in a state that had taken a distinctly nativist turn of late, with anti-Hindi sentiments bleeding into its politics.