Survival Lessons From Grassroots

Post-results drama brings former PM Deve Gowda back into national reckoning ahead of the 2019 polls

- Ajay Sukumaran

IN end-February this year, Janata Dal (Secular) supremo H.D. Deve Gowda surprised everybody at the Jain shrine of Shravanabelagola by taking the arduous route to the top of the hill for the mahamastak-abhisheka—the grand anointing of the ancient Gomateshwara statue that takes place every 12 years. Three months shy of 85, he made the gritty resolve to tackle the steep climb of 600odd rock-hewn steps on foot, refusing to be carried up in a doli.

Last Friday, as Gowda celebrated his 85th birthday, his son H.D. Kumaraswamy was fighting tooth and nail to ascend on to the chair of the chief minister—12 years after he assumed that post. Karnataka’s first political family from Haradana halli village—the H in their initials—was now back at the forefront of the state’s power game, and Gowda, suddenly, once again in the reckoning for the 2019 political equations at the national level. In Haradanahalli, a tiny village in the fertile farmlands of south-central Karnataka’s Hassan, 170 km west of Bangalore, he’s a hero: the man who put the region on the map. The mud-walled house that Gowda grew up in no longer exists but locals will eagerly show you the tiny school where he studied, just as they will fill you in with all the details of his political career, great battles and bitter fights.

“He has made Hassan and Karnataka proud,” says S. Subbaraya Gowda, a retired schoolmaster and staunch follower.

“Has Modi or anyone spoken ill of Deve Gowda?” Sometime in the 1970s, by which time he was already an MLA, Gowda shifted from Haradanahalli to Paduvalahippe, a village across the Hemavathy river where he is still a registered voter. No party campaigned in Paduvalahippe in these elections, according to a recent local news report, because it was pointless to do so.