Behind the vote

The BJP government in Karnataka wins the trust vote in the Assembly but loses people's trust.

in Bangalore

POLITICAL instability is not new to Karnataka. In the past five years the State has seen two coalition governments the first between the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) and the second between the JD(S) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) collapse; a midterm election throw up a fractured verdict; and, from 2008, rebellion from within threaten a BJP government periodically.

Also not new to Karnataka is the use of money power in driving politics and winning political allegiance. Money was the medium in which much of the instability of the past few years played out.

However, the present juncture in the State's politics puts the instability and corruption of the past in the shade. The recent crisis saw unprecedented political skulduggery and opportunism, with big money entering the game of engineering defections and winning support. In this, the faction-ridden BJP, as the party in power, and the opposition JD(S) are both involved.

It is in the context of this instability that the BJP's victory in the second vote of confidence in the Legislative Assembly on October 14 held just four days after the first trust motion may well be short-lived. The BJP won 106 votes as against 100 of the combined Opposition, in a House that had been reduced to 206 (present and voting) as against its normal strength of 225 (one is a nominated member). The outcome of the trust motion was circumscribed by an order of the Karnataka High Court that was hearing a petition by 16 legislators, 11 from the BJP and five independents, who had challenged their disqualification by the Assembly Speaker, K.G. Bopaiah, on October 10.

The chain of events that led up to the latest crisis the Yeddyurappa government weathered a serious threat from rebels led by the Bellary Ministers, who are in the mining business, in October 2009 started with a Cabinet reshuffle in September in which three Ministers were dropped and six were inducted. Well into his third year in office, Yeddyurappa felt he had consolidated his position sufficiently to free himself of the dependence on the independents, drop his detractors and induct some favourites such as Energy Minister Shobha Karandlaje into the Ministry.

The reshuffle left several aspirants to ministerial positions angry and resentful, either because they were dropped or because they were not considered for portfolios. The independents had been inducted into the Ministry as a reward for their crucial support to the BJP in forming the government in 2008. (Before the present crisis, the BJP had a strength of 117, excluding the Speaker, the Congress 73 and the JD(S) 28 in the Assembly. The support of five independents had given the BJP a clear and comfortable majority.) It was not just the independents who were left disgruntled, but also BJP legislators who had been waiting for their chance to become Ministers legislators such as H.S. Shankaralinge Gowda, who got elected on the BJP ticket four times in a row from Mysore and became an open and vociferous critic of the Chief Minister.

The State government, particularly Yeddyurappa, was already under considerable pressure from the opposition, the Congress and the JD(S) over an alleged land scam in which they had implicated both the Chief Minister and the Minister for Information Technology, Biotechnology and Housing, Katta Subramanya Naidu. The opposition alleged that Naidu had been involved in the acquisition of land by the Bangalore Development Authority and the Karnataka Industrial Areas Development Board (KIADB). Naidu's son Jagadish Naidu, a BJP corporator, was arrested on October 5 by the Lokayukta (ombudsman) police for allegedly bribing a witness in connection with the investigation into an alleged fraud in the payment of compensation for land acquired by the KIADB.

Under fire from the opposition over the land scam issue, Yeddyurappa was unprepared for the extent and depth of the disgruntlement among the party legislators over his Cabinet expansion. A full-blown revolt hit him when the discontent exploded into the open. A group of legislators, led by Minister for Excise M.P. Renukacharya, stormed off to a luxurious resort in Tamil Nadu on October 5, from where they presented their demands. They demanded that the Chief Minister offer some of them ministerial positions and others control of government boards and corporations.

They followed this up with more concrete action. On October 6, as many as 19 of them 14 from the BJP and five independents sent letters to Governor H.R. Bhardwaj withdrawing support to the Yeddyurappa government. (Later in the day, one of the legislators, Dodde Gowda Patil, changed his mind and withdrew his letter.) Seven of the signatories were Ministers. The Governor, on receipt of the letters asked the Chief Minister to prove his government's majority before 5 p.m. on October 12. Yeddyurappa announced that he would hold the trust vote at 11 a.m. on October 11. He sacked four independent Ministers Shivaraj Tangadagi, Venkatarapanappa, P.M. Narendraswamy and D. Sudhakar who had joined the rebel cause. The three BJP rebel Ministers were Renukacharya, Balachandra Jarkiholi and Anand Asnotikar. The rebel group, meanwhile, shifted from Chennai to Kochi and from there to Mumbai. It is not clear exactly when JD(S) State president and former Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy made contact with the dissidents, but he was certainly instrumental in getting the rebels to send in their letters withdrawing support.

The actors in the political game the rebel leaders, the opposition parties and the BJP freely traded charges of making payoffs to buy the loyalties of the rebels. The rebel legislators themselves accused the Yeddyurappa government of offering them bribes to return to the BJP fold, while the BJP alleged that the JD(S) had given them money. In fact, once the Speaker announced that a confidence vote would be held on October 11, the three political parties despatched their legislators to various resorts around the city to prevent them from being poached by other parties a euphemism for being bought over. Parties may argue that keeping loyal legislators in luxury resorts is paid for from party coffers, but clearly, the blandishments offered to the rebels luxury spas and air travel were paid for by sources who have a major stake in the outcome of the political game.

In response to Yeddyurappa's offer to the rebels of restoring their ministerships and portfolios, three of them including their spokesperson Renukacharya, who was among the most vociferous of Yeddyurappa's critics returned to the fold, making the BJP government believe that it had ridden out the storm. The party sent Tourism Minister and billionaire mine-owner G. Janardhana Reddy and Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parikkar to negotiate with the rebels who were ensconced in a five-star hotel in Goa. In the same hotel, Kumaraswamy was persuading the rebels not to change their mind. He reportedly gave them various assurances, although he could not offer them a concrete assurance of being able to form an alternative government with Congress support in the event of the BJP government collapsing.

The Speaker's decision a day before the first confidence vote to disqualify 16 legislators under the anti-defection provision of the 10th Schedule of the Constitution set the stage for the pandemonium on October 11. The provisions of the law specify two grounds on which members can lose their membership. The first is if they have voluntarily given up their membership and the second is if they have defied the whip issued by the party concerned. The Speaker construed the letters sent to the Governor by the rebel legislators withdrawing their support to the government as amounting to a voluntary surrender of their membership of the party. His disqualification of the five independent legislators was done on flimsier grounds that as associate members of the BJP they had attended its legislature party meetings and voted consistently with the BJP bloc in the Assembly.

The Governor stepped in and sent a letter to the Speaker asking him to retain the existing configuration of the House in the interest of a free and fair election, a move that was decried by the ruling party as gubernatorial interference and overreach.

The day of the voting saw pandemonium and violence of a kind never before witnessed in the Karnataka legislature. The disqualified legislators, encouraged by the JD(S), tried to force their way into the Assembly, resulting in a free-for-all and fisticuffs, with the police and marshals on the one side and the opposition legislators on the other. In the midst of the pell-mell, the Speaker took a voice vote and then declared, to a stunned House, that the BJP had won the confidence vote.

The Governor lost no time in sending a letter to President Pratibha Devi Patil recommending President's Rule and for keeping the 13th Legislative Assembly under suspended animation. Meanwhile, the 16 disqualified legislators moved the High Court seeking the revival of their membership of the Assembly. The case was heard by a Special Bench comprising, among others, Chief Justice J.S. Khehar.

There was an outcry from the Opposition parties over the way the confidence vote was muscled through the Assembly. Although the BJP, and Yeddyurappa in particular, tried to put up a defence of the conduct of the Speaker, arguing that the Opposition gave him no choice but to put the confidence motion to a voice vote, there was clearly disquiet within the party over the way it was done and its likely fallout on public opinion.

Interestingly, it was the Governor who unwittingly came to the rescue of the beleaguered government by calling for a second trust vote through the process of division of the vote, on October 14. Yeddyurappa grabbed the opportunity, particularly as the High Court had reserved its order on the disqualification of the 16 legislators. Without the 16 legislators voting, he knew his government would pass the test.

By October 14, the BJP had managed to win over independent legislator Varthur Prakash. With two legislators Manappa Vajjal (BJP), from Lingsugur, and M.C. Ashwath (JD(S)) abstaining the BJP came through with 106 as against the combined Opposition count of 100. The High Court's order that its verdict should be factored into the result of the confidence vote put a dampener on the BJP's victory. If the court sets aside the disqualification of the five independents, the BJP is still in a majority of two (with the Speaker's casting vote). If the disqualification of all the 16 legislators is set aside, then the BJP will be in trouble. The Chief Minister has pre-empted this by announcing that in such an event, a second floor test cannot be held before six months as per constitutional guidelines. In such an eventuality, it would appear that the issue may go to the courts for adjudication.

The BJP may have won the confidence vote, but the confidence it commands in the public sphere has taken a severe drubbing. The inherent instability in the party with a difference, which came to power in 2008 for the first time in a southern State, is related to two factors: first, the unethical mechanism adopted by it to consolidate its numerical strength in the Assembly, and second, the fundamental dissonance between the public objectives of good governance and the private objectives of most BJP legislators. Under Operation Lotus, the BJP bought over Opposition legislators: it made them resign their seats and re-contest on the BJP ticket and then gave them ministerial positions. Secondly, in the last Assembly elections, a flood of moneyed aspirants from sectors such as mining, property development, contracting and private education were given the party ticket. Having spent fortunes on their election campaign, these legislators are naturally looking at ministerial posts in order to nurse their private interests and patronage networks.

This explains the intense competition for ministerial positions, the charges of massive corruption that haunts the BJP, and the overall failure of the BJP government to meet the development expectations of the people of the State.