BJP's traditional Hindutva poll plank fails to strike a chord in Karnataka

A polarised campaign based on its traditional Hindutva plank with starring roles by a Bollywood film and a Hindu god, its promise to deliver a “double engine” government, and, a gamble on as many as 75 new faces did not stop the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from a crushing defeat in Karnataka, the only state in South India where the party has a sizeable footprint. In its defeat, the party has been stung by its lack of strong local faces or local issues as part of the campaign narrative, said leaders of the state unit.

The party’s campaign centred on rallies by national leaders, with the prime minister holding over 20 rallies, and the home minister as many as 30 rallies. PM Modi had urged voters to watch the Bollywood film, The Kerala Story, and sought to raise the issue of Congress’s plan to ban Bajrang Dal as an insult to Bajrang Bali (Hindu god Hanuman) in his rallies, but they were not enough to convince the voter amid mounting anti-incumbency against the party’s state leadership.

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In the party’s campaign, one of the parliamentarians of the party told DH, messaging that centred on national issues did not resonate with the Karnataka voter. “The Congress picked the Amul vs Nandini plank, but no one spoke about it in the last week of campaigns. In a similar vein, the BJP’s raising of issues like the Bajrang Dal ban did not help the party, except for a few seats in the Udupi-Mangalore region,” the leader said, wishing to remain anonymous.

Some of the party’s steps to replicate its successes in states like Gujarat – like fielding 75 new faces, or of changing the chief minister mid-term – failed to work. Over 60 of the new faces lost the elections, and the party not highlighting the sitting CM during its campaign showed that it was uncomfortable with its own leadership.

In fact, a former MLA says that after the octogenarian leader’s exit from the top job, the party’s central leadership has been mostly running the show in the state. The lawmakers said that, in a telling moment, as it became increasingly clear that the party was staring at a colossal defeat, Yediyurappa addressed the press and accepted the party’s fate. “For a man who had to step aside in the middle of his term, Yediyurappa was one of the first and among a handful of leaders to do so, while leaders like union minister Dharmendra Pradhan and general secretary Arun Singh (both state in-charges) were not even in Bengaluru,” the former MLA said.

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Political analyst Radhika Ramaseshan said that the party miscalculated when it assumed that Yediyurappa was only a Lingayat leader. “The party did a mistake in sizing up Yediyurappa; he has moved beyond being a caste leader and was later seen as a formidable face of the farming community. CM Bommai simply could not cultivate a base beyond the Lingayat community,” Ramaseshah said.

Local leaders said that the national leadership’s say on tickets was unhelpful, too. More than 14 meetings were held in Delhi for ticket distribution, and one of the key faces from the state unit who coordinated tickets – national general secretary CT Ravi – lost his seat. “The third list of the party, one can safely say, was one of the key wrongdoings of the campaign,” the former MLA mentioned above said.

Ramaseshan said that the South is a region that the party has not being able to breach because of the issues that are being raised. “The state, in fact, lost its identity under the BJP rule and the affairs of the party were over-centralised,” she said.