SIDDARAMAIAH’S GIMMICKRY IN FULL CRY

The Congress party is desperate to cling on to power in Karnataka, conscious as it is of the fact that it has lost power in several states over the last four years since the Narendra Modi government assumed office at the Centre. With Assembly elections in Karnataka round the corner, its chief minister, Siddaramaiah, is leaving no stone unturned to woo prospective voters. After doling out sops to vulnerable sections of society, Siddaramaiah is now wooing religious vote banks and seeking to strike an emotional chord with the Kannadigas. He is playing identity politics by fuelling resentment against people from other states especially the North. His recent announcement that Karnataka will have its own flag is designed to assert Kannadiga identity and to pit the State against the Centre. All these years, the State had an unofficial bicolour flag, which used to be hoisted during Kannada Rajyotsava and on other state occasions. However, it was not brought under legal sanctity, for which many pro-Kannada organisations and Kannada writers had been seeking since long. By announcing its own flag, only the second state to do so apart from Jammu and Kashmir which has some special rights, Karnataka is appealing to Kannada pride in a clever move. The state government’s move to grant religious minority status to the Veerashaiva-Lingayat community, which is 17 per cent of the State’s population, is a wily move by the chief minister to appropriate this vital vote bank, which has been supporting the BJP at the hustings. This is a clear attempt to upstage BJP chief minister-designate B S Yeddyurappa, who is a Lingayat and has been instrumental in maintaining a firm grip of the BJP on this vital vote bank. Interestingly, the Congress-led erstwhile UPA government had rejected the demand for separate religious status for the Lingayats which the party is now pushing for. Evidently, the attempt is to win the support of the community for the elections by hook or by crook and to drive a wedge between the BJP and the Lingayats. Recently, Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan set the tone for the Centre’s response to the demand for declaring the Veerashaiva-Lingayat community as a linguistic minority by claiming that under Siddaramaiah’s scheme of things, the Dalits among them would lose key reservation benefits. If the Centre rejects the Lingayat demand, the Congress would go to town inciting that community against the Centre.

In the same spirit of driving a wedge between the State and the Centre, and thereby supposedly benefiting from the aroused sentiment among Kannadigas against the immigrants from the North, Siddaramaiah has ordered the removal of Hindi name boards from Metro stations. He has also blamed the Centre of discriminating against Karnataka in the allocation of Central funds. With the record of governance of the Siddaramaiah government being so utterly lacklustre, it remains to be seen whether Congress gimmicks in the elections would yield any results worth the name. The results of the Assembly elections would indeed be an index of how much the emotional appeal has worked for the Congress in Karnataka. There is indeed a last-ditch effort on Siddaramaiah’s part to stave off anti-incumbency which is blowing across the State.