Victory Is Just A Number

Poaching, the BJP avers, is never its business. Yet the party won’t say how it is to muster the numbers it lacks.

- Ajay Sukumaran

IF the Karnataka elections were a movie script, the twist in the tale was timed just about right. The storyline, well, was a mash-up of two previous elections in the state: the BJP running out of gas agonisingly short of the finish line, just like it happened in 2008. And, the Janata Dal (Secular) nestling snugly in the middle of the power game, again back to 2004.

Here’s the story so far: Raj Bhavan has given the BJP 15 days to prove it has a majority—the party has only 104 seats out of 222 seats where elections were held. So, the thorny path ahead, as previous experiments with hung assemblies suggest, is strewn with the possibilities of ‘resort politics’, constitutional conundrums and ‘Operation Lotus’, which is the local slang for engineering defections. The JD(S)­Congress com­bine, which is safely over the halfway mark with 117 seats and has staked claim to form a government, is fuming. The battle for Karnataka is wide open and turning nasty.

If the BJP could stitch up coalitions in Goa and elsewhere despite being a minority, why is it objecting to it in Karna­taka, is the question the JD(S)­Congress camp is asking. “We have to protect our MLAs because they (BJP) are capable of doing anything. Do you think we want to sit in a resort because we haven’t any other work,” asks H.D. Kumaraswamy, the JD(S) chief ministerial candidate, who has accused the BJP of luring partymen with huge money. “We’ll face things as they come.” The BJP, on its part, maintains that poaching and horse ­trading aren’t its business. “It is what the Congress and JD(S) are famous for,” counters the BJP’s Prakash Javadekar, denying the allegations. But the BJP didn’t explain how it will get the numbers it currently lacks.