Heed BSY’s Sagacious Counsel

Former Chief Minister Yediyurappa’s counsel to the Bharatiya Janata Party to avoid a polarizing narrative predicated on Tipu Sultan—Veer Savarkar binary has not come a day too soon. It should be taken as a sagacious advice to the ruling party on the eve of the Assembly elections. Hot heads within the party had been gunning for the 18th century ruler Tipu Sultan and have left no stratagem in their bag of tricks to malign the image of the ruler who fell a martyr in the 4th Anglo Mysore war in 1799 in Srirangapatnam.

Four-time Chief Minister Yediyurappa is an old war horse who was prevailed upon by the High Command to vacate the chief ministerial seat for the younger incumbent Mr Basavaraj Bommai in July 2021. As the tallest leader of the BJP in the state, he knows the people in Karnataka like the back of his hand . Even while committing himself to the BJP’s Hindutva agenda, he has been deeply averse to communal polarization for political gains and has been opposed to patently divisive campaigns. During his chief ministerial tenure, he never succumbed to pressures from quarters within his party to do anything that would mar communal peace and harmony in the state.

In fact, during the short tenure outside the party when he floated the Karnataka Janata Party and waged the electoral fight against the BJP in 2013, he offered obeisance at Tipu’s mausoleum. Some such gestures were partly motivated by a wish to keep the considerable minority votes on his side in his home constituency of Shikaripur. It is also quite well known that BSY has been a leader who was not willing to sacrifice all principles at the altar of politics and does not pander to baser instincts for short-term goals.

Though BSY has been made to accept a role outside active politics, the BJP can ignore his counsel only at its own peril. He is out but not down. With a solid grip on his Lingayat community and a substantial following among several other sections, he still remains the best hope for the BJP to mobilise support in the state ahead of the polls. He queered the pitch for the party in 2013 when he quit the party in protest against his forced exit from the high chair thereby causing a huge dent in the party’s vote share leading to loss of power.

The BJP will do well to desist from polarising campaign as the state and its populace are largely unresponsive to partisanship. Even in matters of caste, people shun overt references for community-specific mobilisation. In one sense, Yediyurappa’s statement is representative of the fault lines within the BJP with coastal leaders trying to amplify the communal model while the mainland politics remains preponderantly keen to gather inputs on bread and butter issues.