Siddaramaiah’s major Cabinet reshuffle triggers war within Karnataka Congress

If elections can be won by rejigging ministries, Karnataka’s Congress Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has already won the state Assembly polls, still two years away. Unfortunately for the Congress and Siddaramaiah, winning an election is somewhat more complicated than reconstituting Cabinets. On Sunday, Siddaramaiah dropped as many as 14 ministers and took on board 13 new ones. It indeed seemed like an impressive exercise to catapult the party into election mode. A close associate of Siddaramaiah told Firstpost that the new 33-member ministry was nothing short of a “war cabinet” to fight the 2018 Assembly election. He nearly made Winston Churchill’s war ministry look like a kabaddi team. But the constitution of the “war cabinet” quickly triggered a war within the Congress. The resignation of 63-year-old actor Ambareesh, who was dropped from the ministry, and the threat by many others who were left out to follow suit is just one indication of the things to come. [caption id=“attachment_2841960” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. File photo. PTI[/caption] Ambareesh was sacked apparently because of his poor health and non-performance. In fact, he only made rare appearances in office as Housing Minister in the last three years. (His office appearances were even fewer earlier when he was the Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting for four months in the UPA-1 government in Delhi.) Having acted in 212 Kannada films, he has a sizable fan club, but his political clout is confined to his native Mandya district, where his Vokkaliga community calls the shots. The exit of Ambareesh may politically mean little to Siddaramaiah. But a bigger threat may emerge from senior and more politically powerful Congress leaders, within and outside the ministry, who are yet to reconcile themselves to Siddaramaiah’s leadership. Most partymen consider Siddaramaiah to be an Johnny-come-lately. He joined the Congress only in 2006, after he was expelled from Janata Dal (Secular). It is clear that the Congress high command wants to make the Cabinet reconstitution look like an image makeover in time for the election. But elections can be won or lost on perceptions — a ministry reshuffle, unless proved otherwise, is nothing but a redistribution of power and pelf among warring partymen. This perception persists despite the sacking of some ‘tainted’ ministers. Labour Minister Parameshwar Naik, who squabbled with a woman police officer, Minor Irrigation Minister Shivaraj Tangadagi, accused of wrongdoing in his department, Primary Education Minister Kimmane Rathnakar, allegedly involved in the leak of pre-university question papers, were among those who were axed. That’s all very good, but consider this: Santosh Lad, who had earlier been shown the door for his alleged role in a mining scam, has been reinstated. He is perhaps too wealthy to be kept out. Siddaramaiah’s supporters are gloating over the fact that he has inducted “young blood” into his team. But four fresh faces — Priyank Kharge, Tanveer Sait, Pramod Madhwaraj and SS Mallikarjun — are the sons of four senior party leaders: Mallikarjun Kharge, late Azeez Sait, Manorama Madhwaraj and Shamanur Shivashankarappa. In the case of Shivashankarappa, it was a clean swap: father was dropped and the son was taken in. There is another family switch: sugar tycoon and Excise Minister Satish Jharkhiholi was dropped and his brother Ramesh Jharkhiholi was taken in. The reconstitution, which meant the sacking of 40 percent of the ministers, has the makings of the “surgery” that Congress leader Digvijaya Singh had recommended for the party after the rout in the recent elections in Assam, Kerala and West Bengal. Singh is in-charge of the party affairs in Karnataka and has evidently begun the surgery with Karnataka, the only big state in India that the party rules now. The surgery has stopped short of sacking Siddaramaiah himself because that would mean a rebellion by the Chief Minister and loss of power even before elections. So the party went in for the next best option of changing his team. Despite the appearances of Siddaramaiah having had a “free hand” in giving a facelift to the party, it has the unmistakable hand of Singh behind it, considering that many new ministers can’t see eye to eye with the Chief Minister. One question that the whole operation throws up is whether Singh and Siddaramaiah will be able to cope with the post-surgical complications that have already begun to show up. Though the new team represents a fair balance in the distribution of ministerial berths among the backward classes (nine ministers), the upper castes of Lingayats (seven) and Vokkaligas (five) and others, history of Karnataka’s politics shows that any political exercise aimed at ‘pleasing all’ ends up in ‘pleasing none’. Despite the balancing exercise, Siddaramaiah will find it difficult to erase the impression of his backward-class bias that has clearly distanced upper castes from the party. He belongs to the backward class of Kurubas, while the state party president is a Dalit. Has the Congress woken up too late? And there is a more important question: has the surgery come a bit too late? Three years have already gone by after Siddaramaiah took over as Chief Minister following the 2013 assembly election. During this time, he has been hitting headlines for all the wrong reasons. The Rs 70-lakh diamond-studded Hublot watch that he wore for some time is the most talked about one only because it was the most visible symbol. There have been bigger scandals involving both the Chief Minister and many of his ministers. Scams apart, there has been discontent among vast sections of people. Between May and October in 2015, an average of three farmers committed suicide every day. There was police violence against people demanding higher wages and reservations among other things. There have been six attacks on Africans in Bengaluru over a period of one year. A rationalist and an RTI activist were murdered. Attacks on women have been on the rise. And there has been little development of infrastructure in Bengaluru, which has over the last 25 years degenerated from a salubrious Garden City into a hellhole for most residents. As if all this was not enough, not a day passed without the media featuring the open bickering within the Congress. Partymen, including senior leaders, have been competing with leaders of Janata Dal (Secular) and the BJP in heaping blame on Siddaramaiah for something or the other. All this has left a deep dent in the image of the Congress and its Chief Minister over the past three years. It’s not surprising that the BJP, which brought back former Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa as the state party chief three months ago, is gung-ho about winning the 2018 election and returning to power. The BJP improved its electoral performance from 40 seats and 18 percent votes in the 2013 Assembly election to 17 (of the 28) seats and 43 percent votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha poll. Considering that the Assembly election is two years away and that the last six months will be taken up by first election-related manoeuvres and then the code of conduct, Siddaramaiah has just one and a half years left to undo the damage of three years. And that needs a lot more work than reconstituting ministry. Author tweets @sprasadindia