CABINET RESHUFFLE PART OF BJP’S STRATEGY FOR COmING ELECTIONS

It is learnt that BJP chief Amit Shah has decided to “rework” the strategy for the coming Assembly elections, especially in Gujarat and Karnataka, and the 2019 general elections. The third Cabinet reshuffle and the party’s reorganisation are being seen in this light. The Prime Minister and the BJP chief don’t want to take it lightly, as they think that the wind can blow suddenly the opposite way, if not controlled. The huge criticism following large scale violence after Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s sentence in two rape cases has also rattled the party leadership. The BJP defeat in the Bawana Assembly byelection in Delhi by over 24,000 votes by its arch enemy Aam Admi Party, has made the faces of the top leaders red. It is unacceptable, the Delhi BJP leaders have been told. The defeat has come too soon after the cliffhanger victory of Congress leader Ahmed Patel in the Rajya Sabha polls in Gujarat. The BJP seems to be tense about the Karnataka scene as Congress Chief Minister Siddaramaiah is using every trick in his playbook to push home the early advantage for past three months. He is now tapping into the caste cauldron that sets Karnataka apart from its ideologically driven southern neighbours, to set the stage for a Congress re-election. The hard fought campaign that led to the recent bypoll victories were an indicator of Siddaramaiah’s take-no-prisoners style of campaigning. The BJP had seen the defection to its ranks of S.M. Krishna, the once revered Vokkaliga icon of old Mysore, and Dalit leader V. Srinivasprasad, whose hold over Nanjangud was legendary, as well as the huge rallies of BJP’s Lingayat mascot, former CM B.S. Yeddyurappa, which were packed with Lingayats, as a game-changer. But Siddaramaiah shrugged all this off. The BJP failed to see what Siddaramaiah had—that however much the voters respected Yeddyurappa, the upper caste Lingayats, who had shunned Srinivasprasad for his Dalit antecedents and his anti-Lingayat rhetoric through the five consecutive terms that he had held Nanjangud, were unlikely to shed their deeply held antiDalit beliefs and vote for the former Congressman whom they once reviled. Siddaramaiah’s bag of tricks now includes digging deep into the psyche of “Kannada pride” and drawing on deep-rooted prejudices and a sense of pride in the Kannada language to win more brownie points. All signboards at the Bengaluru Metro stations were originally in English, Hindi and Kannada. Right-wing groups like the Karnataka Rakshana Vedika lost no time in cashing in, blackening the Hindi billboards to boost BJP support. Siddaramaiah’s inner circle of advisers, who include poets and writers like Patil Puttappa, advised him against any move that would invite the wrath of the Kannada revanchists. The CM swiftly announced Congress support for the two languages—Kannada and English—over the threelanguage formula. With the language trump card done and dusted, the CM has also thrown a second Kannada revanchist card into play. Neither the opposition JDS nor the BJP saw it coming. Again, it was his closed circle of cultural czars who suggested that he could tap into Kannada pride by promoting the use of a Kannada flag, at all state functions. Few know that he was “stealing the idea” from under the nose of the BJP, and that the last man to raise the issue was none other than Yeddyurappa.