PERCENTAGE POLITICS

Just the other day, Basavaraj Bommai had made a conspicuous break from convention.

- Ajay Sukumaran

After he convened a full cabinet meet on March 24, Karnataka’s chief minister chose to brief the press himself, instead of deputing a senior minister. The proactive urgency explained itself within days, as May 10 was declared as the date for assembly polls. In effect, that was his last pre-poll cabinet meet—and the agenda, brimful with 119 items, indeed matched up to the occasion. Two moves, in particular, were loaded—the allocation of internal quotas for various subgroups in the Scheduled Castes (SC) list, and the increase in Other Backward Classes (OBC) reservation for the two key caste groups in the state, Veerashaiva-Lingayats and Vokkaligas. Especially how the space for the latter was created.

Taking up these matters, the CM noted, had been akin to ‘stirring up a hornet’s nest’. “For 2-3 decades, governments kept putting things off. There had been no effort to find solutions,” he said. But the solution that the BJP came up with was essentially to take Muslims out of backward classes reservation, thereby freeing up a 4 per cent quota which would then be equally redistributed among the Lingayats and Vokkaligas.