Not Exactly Virgin Soil To Plough

BSY is Karnataka BJP’s face in the battle for power. The party doesn’t want signs of its past mistake to re-emerge.

- Ajay Sukumaran

FIVE years ago, when the BJP went to elections in Karnataka as the ruling party, things were at the party’s ebb—a ‘suicidal moment’ as one insider put it. Its voteshare had fragmented into three pieces and its image severely dented, in stark contrast to a Modi wave sweeping across the country at the time. In the years since, the graph of its best­ known face in Karnataka has been on the upswing: B.S. Yeddyurappa clawed his way back into the party to become its state chief. Now, as the rhyming slogan goes, the ‘Vikas Jodi’ (pair) in Karnataka is ‘Yeddyurappa­Modi’.

The reasons for that are pretty obvious. The 75-yer-old Lingayat leader, a former chief minister, has significant clout among his community members who form 17 percent of the electorate. Yeddyurappa is easily the only state leader in the BJP with a mass appeal cutting across communities. He is a tireless campaigner, having criss-crossed the state several times over the past year. So, the BJP insisted that the unofficial age limit of 75 years, which it applied to other veterans, wasn’t relevant in Yeddyurappa’s case. Of course, the ‘baggage’ from his previous ruling stint still dogs him, making him vulnerable to the taunts from the main rival, CM Siddaramaiah, much as the BJP stresses that Yeddyurappa has been cleared in all the corruption cases against him.