This 27 February, as he turns 77, the BJP’s ultimate insider and face of the South, will become one of the party’s oldest serving active leaders.
When Bookanakere Siddalingappa Yediyurappa was sworn in for the fourth time as Chief Minister of Karnataka, last June, no-one expected he would be given a free hand.
This was not the Bharatiya Janata Party of old. The amiable Lal Krishna Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi had given way to the far more acerbic and exacting duo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Home Minister and party president, Amit Shah.
With a less than simpatico RSS overseer in B.L. Santhosh, who had ensured the appointment of not one but three Deputy Chief Ministers, one of whom was Laxman Savadi, a Lingayat leader wannabe, alongside protégé Nalin Kumar Kateel as the BJP state chief, most gave credence to the buzz in Delhi that Yediyurappa, a year shy of his 77th birthday, was headed to the margdarshak mandal that Advani-Joshi and others of that vintage now occupied.
No-one gave him more than a few months, a mid-term change of guard almost a certainty. If not Savadi, it could even be the youthful Aswath Narayan with deep roots in the RSS as CM, in a sop to the powerful Vokkaliga lobby in the IT capital.
Yet, come February 2020, after a string of defeats for the BJP, six by the last count, in state after state across the Hindi heartland, the only BJP leader left standing is Yediyurappa, who has defied every doomsday prediction thus far. He has shrugged off not just the margdarshak kiss of death, but the “dynasty” tag as well. The Karnataka Chief Minister’s son, Vijayendra—dubbed the “Super CM” by a growing chorus of critics—is angling to be inducted as general secretary of the state unit, which could be the final seal of approval from the Modi-Shah dispensation.
The first sign that there may be a rethink in the works, came at 11.00 pm on 8 December 2019, the night before bypoll results were to be announced for the 15 seats that had been vacated by the Congress and Janata Dal(S) rebels, and which brought down the previous Congress-backed H.D. Kumaraswamy government. BSY’s phone was ringing off the hook. It was Prime Minister Narendra Modi, calling to find out what he saw in the electoral tea leaves. BSY’s prediction would give him the comprehensive 13-seat sweep that gave him an unassailable majority in the house.
The second signal was equally significant and also centred on the BJP bugbear—“dynasty”. The whispers, growing ever louder were that Shah would not countenance a bigger role for Vijayendra, the son and heir, despite the manner in which he pulled off an unprecedented first time victory for the BJP in the Vokkaliga dominated Mandya seat of K.R. Pete. The mysterious night letters that have surfaced this past week which are openly questioning the role played by Vijayendra only underline the deep disquiet in party ranks in the state even as insiders say this is the Congress-JDS dirty tricks brigade at work. In fact, photographs of Shah with the father and son at a meeting that both were invited to, were widely circulated on social media by Vijayendra. Would he have done so, without the blessing of the party boss, is the question?
Vijayendra, left red-faced after he was denied an Assembly seat ticket from Varuna in the 2019 Assembly polls at the behest of the anti-BSY lobby at the very last minute, the seat from where former Congress Chief Minister Siddaramaiah’s son was standing and whom he may have even defeated, seems to have clawed his way back into the reckoning. In a masterly move, Vijayendra had co-opted Aswath Narayan to campaign alongside him for the former JDS-turned-BJP candidate Narayana Gowda. The coming together of the Lingayat-Vokkaliga communities is a stratagem that the BJP will be certain to use again to good effect in any future poll, to negate the opposition and keep Karnataka in the saffron fold.
The third validation for the BJP’s southern strongman came from the Veerashaiva Mahakumbh on 17 February, in Varanasi, where BSY shared a stage with the Prime Minister in the latter’s constituency at the launch of the Veerashaiva epic, Siddhantha Shikhamani, flaunting his core belief that the Lingayats and Veerashaivas are one community, and not separate as the Congress’ Siddaramaiah had claimed.
Either way, the event was a long overdue acknowledgement, if one was needed, that BSY was the only one who could bring the Lingayat vote home; Santhosh appointee Laxman Savadi’s spectacular inability to rally the Lingayat vote in the constituencies that abut the Karnataka-Maharashtra border in the bypolls, only reinforced that reality.
But will it be enough? Can Yediyurappa fight the far more insidious enemy on the inside?
Santhosh’s bid to cut BSY to size, a holdover from their running battles that date back to the Lingayat strongman’s first stint as Chief Minister when Yediyurappa ignored him completely, heeding no counsel other than that of his inner group, may or may not have any traction in Delhi. There was the matter of the breakaway Karnataka Janata Paksha that BSY had floated ahead of the 2013 polls, which effectively scuttled the BJP’s chances, and opened the doors to the return of the Congress and the Janata Dal(S). There was also the taint of the corruption charges against him in a de-notification case and his ties to Ballari mine lord Janardhan Reddy, that led to a stint in jail, which the BJP still finds deeply embarrassing.
This time too, in the run up to the bypolls, Yediyurappa has marched to his own drummer, set on sealing alliances with the newfound saffron votaries, disregarding the anger within the ranks of hardcore BJP leaders who resented former Congress loyalists who had been their archrivals being rewarded, while they were denied Cabinet berths despite a lifetime of loyalty.
But in bringing the BJP back into the reckoning in its former southern bastion, the man who hails from the non-descript village of Bookanakare, in the Vokkaliga dominated south, turned the political rulebook on its head. His own journey from RSS apparatchik to Chief Minister is nothing short of epic.
His landowner father, Siddalingappa, is believed to have predicted great things for his son. In a story oft told by the family, Yediyurappa, who lost his mother as a boy of four, and was brought up by a string of aunts and a sister, who continues to live in the modest family home in Bookanakere, railed against being given a Sunday treat of 50 paise as opposed to his cousin being given a rupee, only to be told that he would, one day, see more money than he could ever dream of!
But it would be in the small town of Shikaripura, where he moved, at the behest of a relative, after giving up a government job in Mysuru and Bengaluru, that Yediyurappa would come of age. It was here in a part of Karnataka where the BJP, let alone the RSS, had little or no presence at all, that Yediyurappa helped boost the party’s presence in the early 1970s and through the 1980s. He would soon become the face of the Lingayats, whom he rallied to the cause, to challenge the writ of the powerful Kurubas of the area, facing down the violence that he personally experienced when a Kuruba leader reportedly led a mob that surrounded his house, attacked him with a “churi”, and left him for dead. The fighter in Yediyurappa saw him take every resource at hand, including selling off the jewellery that his well-to-do wife had inherited from her father and rice mill owner, Virabhadra Shastri, as well as the proceeds from the family’s farm and agriculture to keep the Jan Sangh-BJP-RSS political machine oiled and running, leaving his own family to borrow, to pay their bills.
“At the height of the Emergency, he was kept in Ballari jail, where he led a protest against the poor food and facilities,” recalls his older daughter Arunadevi, who remembers being taken to the Vidhana Soudha, shortly after he won the seat from Shikarpura and being shown the treasury benches that her feisty father announced to his family he would one day occupy. The trigger for that ascent to the hot seat would come from the longstanding Lingayat grouse of being deprived of power by the Vokkaligas, which JDS leader H.D. Kumaraswamy played into, when he refused to hand over power to Yediyurappa in the 2007 power sharing “20-20” arrangement that went awry.
This 27 February as he turns 77, the BJP’s ultimate insider and face of the South, will become one of the party’s oldest serving active leaders. Facing down his detractors, who cite his age and his singular ways to step up calls for an honourable exit for the Karnataka strongman, he refuses to see the calumny heaped at his door for refusing to be a team player, as anything but a badge of honour, as an acknowledgement by his enemies that his track record in electoral politics sets him above them all, that his push for a NextGen Lingayat leader in his son, is to consolidate that hold.
What will it be for BSY as he approaches this fork in the road? Is it the end of an era? Or, a second coming for a BJP leader, adept at marrying politics and ideology?
Neena Gopal is a journalist and an author.