Karnataka municipal election results: BJP loses Assembly polls advantage, but Congress, JD(S) have little to cheer

The outcome of local body elections anywhere in India is like putty in the hands of politicians. They can twist and turn it, maul and mutilate it, shape and reshape it into anything to suit their convenience in their public postures. You can have a party winning local body elections celebrating it and claiming it’s a pointer to the next Assembly or Lok Sabha poll. And you can expect a losing party to shout from rooftops that local body polls are fought only on local issues that will have no bearing on general elections. But parties go into a song and dance or some philosophical humbug about local issues only for public consumption. Privately, they admit that, though local personalities and issues weigh heavily in such elections, they are a reasonably good barometer for people’s mood. The 2019 Lok Sabha poll will no doubt have the inevitable Narendra Modi factor and other national issues playing their role. But Karnataka’s parties can ignore at their own peril the warnings thrown up by the results of the urban local body elections announced on Monday. [caption id=“attachment_4474811” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of BS Yeddyurappa. PTI[/caption] It should come as no surprise that, for the record, both BJP, as well as Congress and Janata Dal (Secular), are going to great pains to interpret the results in Karnataka as their respective victories. But there was only one problem: nobody really won the polls. BJP and Congress are more or less neck-and-neck while JD(S) came up a poor third. Parties retain Assembly strongholds Of the 2,662 constituencies—or wards— in the 105 urban local bodies , Congress won 982, followed by 929 of BJP and 375 of JD(S). And of the 22 districts where elections were held, BJP did better than Congress in seven, Congress did better in eight, while the two parties scored almost equally in seven. Despite being part of the alliance that rules Karnataka, Congress and BJP have had a “friendly fight” in these elections. If this voting pattern continues when polls for urban local bodies are held in the remaining eight districts in the second phase, probably in February next, Congress and JD(S) will still be somewhat on an equal footing. In broad terms, BJP and Congress did well in the places where their performance was good in the Assembly elections despite some surprises in a few areas. It must have come as a disappointment to JD(S) that it hasn’t done as well as it should have in its bastions like Hassan, the home district of chief minister HD Kumaraswamy and his father and former prime minister HD Deve Gowda. What BJP must ponder over It’s the very levelling out of results between the two main parties that BJP should worry about. Having emerged as the single largest party with 104 seats in the 224-member Karnataka Assembly in elections held three and a half months ago, the party should have notched up more local body seats. Instead, BJP is trailing, though closely, behind Congress that only has 80 seats in the Assembly. It is possible for BJP to argue that though it was far ahead in the number of Assembly seats, its vote percentage was actually marginally less than that of Congress in the May Assembly poll and that it has retained its popular support. The BJP’s Assembly vote share was 36.3 percent, against 38.1 percent of Congress. Such an argument falls flat for two reasons. One is that BJP preens itself as a party enjoying a near-monopoly of support in urban pockets, but the results that we are talking about are of elections to urban local bodies and not rural panchayats. Clearly, BJP should have done better than it has. State BJP president BS Yeddyurappa admitted as much in his very first reaction to the results on Monday, though he later sang a different tune saying the outcome amounted to a “victory” for his party. The second reason why BJP leaders should lose sleep is that its campaign about what was clearly an opportunistic alliance that Congress and JD(S) struck to rule the state after the Assembly election made little impact. Any hopes that BJP leaders may have had that it would be swamped with a sympathy vote from people for being denied the chance to form the government have been dashed.

An important lesson that BJP must learn from this is that Karnataka is showing no signs of turning Congress-mukt (free). Even if Congress cuts an abysmal figure in most of the rest of India because of a bankrupt leadership starved of ideas to counter BJP, the party continues to be a force to reckon with in Karnataka and is showing no signs of being finished off.

Only hope for BJP The only thing that BJP can perhaps take comfort from is that these elections were held less than four months after the Assembly elections and that the Congress-JD(S) coalition government will commit more blunders in the coming weeks and months to change things for the better for the party before the Lok Sabha poll.  If BJP banks on such an eventuality, its hopes may not be entirely misplaced. The coalition has been tottering along like a blunderbuss without a direction or any seeming purpose other than that it wants to keep BJP out of power. Stories of infighting within and between Congress and JD(S) appear in the media on a daily basis. The fact that Kumaraswamy is the chief minister though his JD(S) has fewer than half the Assembly seats of alliance partner Congress is at the root of the predicament that the coalition is in. Former chief minister Siddaramaiah of Congress hasn’t been—and will perhaps never be— able to come to terms with the fact that Kumaraswamy, his long-time arch enemy, is occupying the top job as part of an arrangement that is totally one-sided in favour of JD(S). The coalition has still not recovered from the convulsions caused by Siddaramaiah’s recent statement  that he would like to be the chief minister again. That Congress and JD(S) have fought the local body elections separately in spite of their alliance may have been a good thing for the morale of the workers of the two parties. But this also has exacerbated tensions and rivalry between workers, hardly what the parties need if they are fighting the 2019 Lok Sabha poll together, which they say they will. The author tweets @sprasadindia