Coalition crisis

With the break-up of the JD(S)-BJP alliance, Karnataka appears headed for another coalition experiment.

in Bangalore

POLITICS in Karnataka is once again on the boil with the second coalition experiment in three years coming apart. The Janata Dal (Secular)-Bharatiya Janata Party Ministry has all but collapsed with the entire contingent of BJP Ministers 18 out of a Cabinet of 34 submitting their resignations to the Chief Minister, H.D. Kumaraswamy, on October 2, and the JD(S) formally calling off the alliance at a meeting of its political affairs committee in New Delhi on October 4. With a session of the State legislature called for October 18 when the Chief Minister will have to prove his majority in a floor test, the State appears headed for another coalition government with all the fractious opportunism that marked the earlier two, or fresh elections.

Coalition dharma is a term often used by ruling coalitions in India to describe the ground rules or principles that frame the working arrangement of the parties sharing power. While stresses and tensions between alliance partners are only to be expected, Karnatakas first two coalitions have succumbed to factional pulls and political opportunism rather than deviations from any lofty set of founding principles. Nothing would illustrate this better than the coalition conduct of the JD(S) and the BJP. After all, Kumaraswamy had put all ideological concerns aside when he stepped out of the Congress-JD(S) coalition in January 2006 to strike a deal with the BJP. And the BJP did not think twice about doing business with a party that had sworn its opposition to its basic political principles and that had opportunistically walked out of one alliance to join another. It is no dharma that Kumaraswamys sudden realisation of the dangers of the BJPs communal agenda comes at a time when he was expected to step down and let Deputy Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa of the BJP take his place as Chief Minister.

The present crisis can be traced back to the May 2004 elections to the State Assembly. The results threw up a three-way division of votes with none of the three major political parties namel,y the Congress, the JD(S) or the BJP getting a majority in the 224-member Assembly. This presented the necessity of forming a coalition if fresh elections were to be avoided; and for obvious reasons no party or legislator wanted the option of elections. The BJP, with 79 members, was the largest party, but the Congress and the JD(S) with a strength of 65 and 57 respectively, appeared to be the natural allies, united ideologically (as it appeared then) by their opposition to the BJP.

The alliance between the Congress and the JD(S) collapsed because the JD(S) component, especially the faction led by Kumaraswamy, was unhappy with the partys status as junior partner. Behind the scenes, but clearly calling the shots for his party, was the figure of H.D. Deve Gowda, former Prime Minister and the national president of the JD(S). The coalition with N. Dharam Singh of the Congress as Chief Minister and Siddaramaiah of the JD(S) as Deputy Chief Minister lasted from May 2004 to January 2006, ending with Kumaraswamy walking out of the coalition with a group from his party and striking a deal with the BJP a move that Deve Gowda was never comfortable with, but tolerated out of a sense of loyalty to his son.

Other than alleging that the Congress was trying to split the JD(S), the reasons advanced by the JD(S) for breaking the alliance were never made specific. The humiliation factor that the Congress party repeatedly insulted Deve Gowda and his family was played on again and again by Deve Gowda. The ideological turnaround was explained by Kumaraswamy subsequently with the argument that economic development (of the State) was his ideology, more important than abstract notions of secularism. He portrayed himself as a man in a hurry who had to attend to the here-and-now of the peoples economic and social needs, and said that ideology was secondary.

The present coalition came into being on the basis of a power-sharing agreement signed in February 2006 between the two parties. This envisaged a 20-month period for each Chief Minister. The portfolios were divided, with the JD(S) retaining Home, Public Works, Primary Education, Law and Parliamentary Affairs, Energy, and Transport, amongst others, and the BJP getting Finance, Higher Education, Irrigation, Revenue, Industry, and Food and Civil Supplies, amongst the more important ministries.

Tensions between the partners surfaced within two or three months of the coalition coming to power. The BJPs Bellary unit led by Janardhan Reddy, a billionaire mine-owner--turned-politician, and several others with the same background fired the first salvo by going public on allegations of corruption against Kumaraswamy, his brother H.D. Revanna, and other members of the Gowda family. Janardhan Reddys disclosures, backed by evidence in the form of video recordings of Environment Minister C. Chennigappa allegedly collecting slush money from mine owners, shook the coalition. The charges were as much an embarrassment to the Yediyurappa faction of the BJP that wanted the coalition to continue, as to the JD(S). The BJP central leadership had to intervene to settle the matter.

While Kumaraswamy and Deve Gowda are today highlighting the role of the BJP in the Mangalore riots of October 2006 and the Baba Budangiri shrine controversy of December 2006 as examples of the partys communal agenda, the JD(S) in government did little to avert them or to stop their escalation. The Mangalore riots, as independent investigations by citizens groups and the media established, were instigated by Sangh Parivar groups against minorities, who lost confidence in the impartiality of the police and the state machinery. This despite the fact that the Home department was under a JD(S) Minister. The Baba Budan controversy is a yearly December happening, when the Sangh Parivar uses its muscle to mobilise crowds and conduct rituals, in defiance of the law, near the Sufi shrine of Baba Budangiri. The JD(S) took a soft line on this so as not to offend its coalition partner.

An issue that rankled the JD(S) and the Gowda family in particular was the BJPs support for the controversial Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC), an expressway project promoted by Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprises (NICE) of Ashok Kheny, a flamboyant non-resident Indian with strong political connections in the State. The JD(S), which had drafted a piece of legislation for the takeover of the project on grounds that it had violated the original framework agreement, could not even place this before the Cabinet because of the BJPs opposition. The BMIC project is tangled in litigation before the Supreme Court. What angered Deve Gowda even more was the contempt petition filed against the Kumaraswamy government by NICE in the Supreme Court.

The JD(S) watched with increasing alarm as the BJP, and its Chief-Minister-in-waiting Yediyurappa, claimed authorship of the populist schemes of the last Budget such as the Bhagyalakshmi insurance scheme for girls, the waiver of interest on farm loans, the widow pension scheme, and the urban housing schemes for the poor. The Chief Minister had already launched his extremely popular Janata Darshans and village visits, where he stayed overnight with families from the disadvantaged strata.

The strains between the partners were first aired in public by Labour Minister Iqbal Ansari of the JD(S), who claimed in an election campaign meeting in Ullal in March this year that about 40 BJP Members of the Legislative Assembly were in favour of Kumaraswamys continuance as Chief Minister. This was echoed soon after by D.T. Jayakumar, Housing Minister of the JD(S), who said that Yediyurappa was not capable of handling the challenges of the coalition, a claim he repeated on the floor of the Assembly.

As the time neared for the handover on October 2, it was the turn of the BJP to watch with dismay the increasing evidence of the JD(S) reluctance to cede power. Even though Kumaraswamy in public stood by his promise of resigning on October 2, Deve Gowda increasingly hardened his stand.

Two events strengthened the hand of Deve Gowda, who by September had re-emerged as the partys final authority on the matter of power transfer. The first of these was the results of the urban local body elections in September, in which the JD(S) did spectacularly well. It won 1,502 of the 5,004 wards. Although this placed it second only after the Congress, which won in 1,606 wards, its dramatic improvement from the 2001 elections, when it won only 370 out of 4,629 wards, was a shot in the arm for the party. It viewed this as a vote of confidence for its performance in government.

The Bellary faction of the BJP, which had never reconciled to the alliance, was responsible for precipitating the recent crisis and giving Deve Gowda and Kumaraswamy the handle to break the alliance with. Following a skirmish just before the polling day of the urban local body elections between JD(S) and BJP workers in Bellary, Tourism Minister B. Sriramalu filed a criminal complaint in the Cowl Bazar police station in Bellary city accusing the Chief Minister of abetting a conspiracy to murder him. Sriramulu subsequently resigned under pressure from his party, although he never rescinded his charges; he in fact repeated them in his resignation letter to party chief Yediyurappa.

Sriramulus complaint was a turning point in the developing crisis. Deve Gowda cancelled the talks he had scheduled with BJP leaders, returned to Bangalore and said that the power-sharing issue would have to be decided by the Political Affairs Committee of the party. The BJP cried foul over the JD(S) opportunism, forgetting, it would appear, its own opportunism in buying into the alliance in the first place. Since October 2, Kumaraswamy has lashed out at the BJP at every available public forum, defending his breach of trust with it with the argument that breaking a promise is preferable to unleashing the communal rule of the BJP on the people of Karnataka.

The outcome of the floor test will depend on which way the Congress votes. It is to the Congress that Deve Gowda is looking for support. According to informed sources, he is hopeful of hammering out a long-term agreement with central Congress leaders, in which he will seek outside Congress support for the Kumaraswamy government, in return for an electoral alliance in the next general elections and a possible power-sharing agreement after that. The Congress high command would have to enforce such an alliance on the State unit of the Congress, which has publicly stated its opposition to any tie-up with the JD(S).

The outcome of the floor test on October 18 will resolve the present uncertainties. Regardless of whether the JD(S) survives or falls, elections by early next year appear likely in the context of the possible collapse of talks between the Left and the United Progressive Alliance at the Centre. State elections may also be held simultaneously in that case.