Chicken comes home to roost for Yediyurappa

July 27, 2021

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party has scored yet another point over the Indian National Congress—this time over getting rid of their own chief minister. Seventy-eight year old B S Yediyurappa is the fourth saffron party chief minister to be unceremoniously removed from their post in just four and a half months. 

It might have been fifth such change had the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, BJP’s parent organization, not intervened on the behalf of the Uttar Pradesh CM, Yogi Adityanath, whom the central leadership wanted to go after the second wave of corona virus.

Even in the heydays of 1980s the Congress party had not changed its own party chief minister so quickly as the BJP is doing now. First on March 10, it removed Trivendra Singh Rawat from the post of Uttarakhand chief minister. 

This was followed exactly two months later by the swearing in of Himanta Biswa Sarma replacing Sarbananda Sonowal who led the BJP to victory in the Assembly election in Assam. On July 2, Trivendra’s replacement, Tirath Singh Rawat, was asked to go and a day later Pushkar Singh Dhami took oath as the new Uttarakhand CM.

The irony is that all those—except one–who have been given a sort of marching orders are seasoned party men with strong RSS connection. It was only in Assam that both Sonowal and Sarma were imported from the Asom Gana Parishad and Congress in 2011 and 2016 respectively.

The case of Yediyurappa is even curiouser as he was installed exactly two years back by engineering a somewhat unusual type of split in the Janata Dal (Secular)-Congress alliance government led by H D Kumaraswamy. The saffron party managed to secure resignation of 18 legislators of the then ruling combination and through by-election got 12 of them re-elected on the BJP ticket later that year.

The apologists of the BJP dubbed this as a master stroke while the critics called it as a totally unethical practice. The BJP relaxed the unwritten convention of 75 years as the upper limit for any minister, be it in the states or the Centre.

Two years later Yediyurappa is paying the price of that very misadventure.

Though initially everything appears to be hunky-dory and the return of Yediyurappa was largely hailed by the Lingayat, the caste to which he belongs.  But gradually resentment started brewing up even among the old Lingayat BJP MLAs of north Karnataka who were of the view that they were being neglected and ignored as the plum ministerial berths have been given to the 12 turncoats. So the old party loyalists started gunning for the chief minister and his son, who was accused of rampant corruption, loot, interference and sheer nepotism.

But one of the strongest rebels was H Vishwanath, former JD-S MLA who too switched sides, but could not win the by-poll. He was then made the MLC. Another bitter opponent was Yediyurappa’s own rural development minister, K. S. Eshwarappa.
 
It needs to be mentioned that Yediyurappa formed the first BJP government in south India after the party’s victory in 2008. The saffron party was otherwise down in the dump elsewhere in the country. Yediyurappa was then even called as Narendra Modi of south India as in the rest of India the party’s graph was continuously going down.
The party’s patriarch Lal Krishna Advani had lost his earlier touch after his infamous praise of the founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah during  his visit to that country in June 2005. In 2009 Lok Sabha poll the BJP fared even worse and its tally came down to 116.

But Yediyurappa had to quit in 2011 after his indictment on the charges of corruption. His relationship with Reddy brothers, the alleged mining mafia , too came under strong criticism. Two of the brothers were minister while the third a BJP MLA.

However, after his resignation Yediyurappa held the party central leadership responsible for letting him down and a few months before the 2013 Assembly election formed his own party, Karnataka Janata Paksha.

But after the rout of both the BJP and KJP in that election he made a home-coming to the party on the eve of 2014 Lok Sabha poll. Thus the saffron party managed to make a comeback and the politically powerful Lingayats returned to the party’s fold.

This time again Yediyurappa had to go because of the revolt from within. Yediyurappa’s supporters made a brazen display of caste politics with religious leaders of Lingayat sect openly coming out in his favour. Now he wants to rule the state through proxy.
The overthrow of Yediyurappa has the potential to shake the Shivraj Singh Chauhan government in Madhya Pradesh which returned to power on March 23 last year after engineering a similar split in the Congress government led by Kamal Nath.

The revolt in the Congress was led by former Union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, who finally got a ministerial position in the Narendra Modi cabinet on July 7 last.
But many old guards in the BJP are feeling neglected and are alleging that the turncoats are getting more importance. At the grassroots level several of them have even crossed over to the Congress.  Chauhan is busy doing the balancing act between the new entrants and the original BJP legislators.

In neighbouring Rajasthan former BJP CM Vasundhara Raje is in private resisting any move by the central leadership to cause split in the state Congress as she fears that Sachin Pilot, whom the BJP is eying on, may be rewarded with the post of chief minister, and thus would mar her future prospect.

—INDIA NEWS STREAM