The tottering coalition government of the Congress and the Janata Dal (S) in Karnataka was voted out in a confidence vote in the Legislative Assembly on July 23 evening after a prolonged political drama.
The coalition government headed by Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy was reduced to a minority after 15 legislators of coalition resigned claiming that they were not treated well by their party bosses.
However, it is an open secret by now that these legislators willingly joined Opposition BJP’s strategy, known as Operation Kamala, in which it lured these MLAs with the promise of getting them elected to the Legislative Assembly as its nominees, along with other incentives which may include a berth in the council of ministers.
The BJP is all set to form the government on its own strength for a second time in Karnataka, the only southern state where it has ever held power.
However, this might not be an end to the political instability that the state has been facing since 2018 Assembly elections which resulted in a hung assembly.
Congress and JD(S), traditional rivals
The outgoing coalition government was a bundle of contradictions from the very beginning. The coalition was formed at the behest of the Congress with the twin objectives of preventing the BJP from coming to power and preparing the ground for a joint fight against the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections 2019.
However, the coalition plan imposed by the party leadership was not taken kindly by the rank and file of both parties which had been traditional rivals for decades. Leaders in the faction-ridden Congress, instead of trying to iron out these differences and inspire the workers, themselves remained confused and kept sending conflicting signals about the continuation of the coalition. As a result, the Congress and the JD(S) suffered their worst-ever defeat in the Lok Sabha election by winning just one seat each.
Post this, the fall of the Kumaraswamy government was imminent. The BJP precipitated the matter by engineering a defection in both Congress and JDS. Having failed repeatedly in its earlier attempts at toppling the government, the BJP played its cards well this time by targeting some influential legislators, including a Congress cabinet minister and the erstwhile president of the state Janata Dal. The resignation of these MLAs has not been accepted by the Assembly speaker for the moment and the matter has been dragged to the Supreme Court. Once the legal hurdles are out of the way, the rebel MLAs would join the BJP and contest in the ensuring by-elections as its nominees.
Assuming that at least eight of them get re-elected, the BJP will get a simple majority in the 224-member Assembly. At present it has 105 members and two Independents supporting it. In order to avoid any risk, the BJP is expected to continue its Operation Kamala and get more coalition MLAs to resign. In the event of the coalition partners winning a majority of the seats in by-elections, the state will plunge into a fresh round of political instability.
BJP's headache to begin
A clear mandate eluded the BJP even when it formed its first Government in Karnataka in 2008 and it had resorted to the same tricks that it has used now to stay in power. The BJP will now leave no stone unturned to get a clear mandate in the next election. However, the challenges before the party are also daunting considering that it has far too many factions each working against the other. The entry of the migrants from the Congress and the JD(S) is also expected to create some heartburns and dissensions within the BJP ranks.
The Congress and the JD(S) stand completely battered and would find it difficult to stop further desertion of their legislators and leaders. It would take some time for them to recover and position themselves to face a re-invigorated BJP and much depends on how the new BJP government conducts itself in office. In all likelihood, the coalition would be abandoned and the two parties would fight the next elections individually.
Lasting just for 14 months, this is the third coalition experiment to meet with a premature end in Karnataka. The first coalition government came into being in 2004 after the elections that year resulted in a hung assembly. This coalition between the Congress and the JD(S) had been in power for just 20 months. A BJP-JD(S) coalition which replaced this also fell after the next 20 months. Earlier in 1983, the first ever non-Congress Government came to power in Karnataka with the BJP extending outside support to a minority Janata Party government. Even this experiment was cut short when Chief Minister Ramakrishna Hegde dissolved the Assembly and went for fresh elections after a little more than a year. While the neighboring Kerala has institutionalized its own form of a stable coalition politics, Karnataka politics seems to have something which works against the culture of sharing power.
(A Narayana is an associate professor with Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. He is a policy researcher and a political commentator)
