Congress De-Saffronizes Karnataka
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2023-05-15 02:47:26
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
View all posts by this Author
The people of Karnataka stuck to doing what they have been doing for the last 38 years - voting out the incumbent. But proving all exit polls wrong (most of them had predicted a hung assembly), the Congress won a resounding majority in the state elections. It gained seats from both the BJP and the JD(S) to race to 136 seats, leaving the BJP with just 65 and the JD(S), which was hoping to play kingmaker in case of a hung assembly, with just 19. Others won 4 seats.
This was as much an anti-incumbency vote against the BJP as it was a pro-Congress vote. The party performed the best any party has done since 1989 when it had won 178 seats. Despite putting in its all, the BJP could not fight back anti-incumbency as well the perception in the minds of the people that it was a disruptive party (the hijab row, the halal meat row and the Muslim traders at Hindu temple fair row) and would not assist in the growth of Karnataka. As many as 12 of the 25 sitting BJP minister lost the elections, the party lost favour with its traditional Lingayat supporters (as 37 of the Congress' 46 candidates from the community won) and the new candidates it had fielded after replacing and angering the old MLAs also did not find favour with the people. The talk of double-engine government was rejected by the people. The party also lost 39 of the 51 SC/ST seats despite increasing the quota.
The Congress, despite obvious and visible differences in the state unit, did extremely well in all constituencies where Rahul Gandhi had walked during his Bharat Jodo Yatra (Gandhi has spent the most time in Kartnataka during the yatra) and won 37 out of the 51 seats on the yatra route. Obviously, the Congress promise in its manifesto to ban organizations like the Bajrang Dal, and of which the BJP tried to make political capital to consolidate the Hindu vote, did not have much effect. The people of Karnataka have shown they want development and will not favour parties that cause disruptions and divide communities.
This is huge victory for the Congress, the fourth state where it will be governing now and the first big state it has de-saffronized after a long time. The Congress was quick to dub its win as BJP-mukt south as with the loss in Karnataka, the BJP has lost the only state it was ruling in south India. This victory will raise Congress' stock within the opposition and proves that while the party might be down, it is not out. The BJP will have to introspect what went wrong while the Congress will have to tackle internal tiffs (Siddharamaiah versus Shivakumar) and get down to governing a state which is poised to become the number one in the country in terms of economic growth. With numbers on its side, it can work freely as it will now be tough for the BJP to engineer defections and bring down the government.
