That a secret ballot was necessary to get DV Deve Gowda, a Yeddyurappa man, elected as the new CM speaks to the BJP’s sordid organisational state.

This should once and all end the BJP’s dream of using its first-ever election victory in a South Indian state as a stepping-stone to power elsewhere in the South. Indeed, the party stands badly discredited and viciously divided between warring factions and caste-based cabals. It would be lucky to retain power in Karnataka without splitting.

The latest fiasco shows that the BJP’s central leadership possesses very little moral authority over state satraps. It failed to rein in Mr Yeddyurappa despite multiple warnings, and long after it became evident that his involvement with the mafia-style illegal mining operation of the Reddy Brothers, Janardhana and Karunakara, and their chief accomplice B Sriramulu, would cost the party a grievous, and potentially unbearable, loss.

In fact, the BJP brass became complicit in Mr Yeddyurappa’s corruption and use of money power. It repeatedly solicited and received funds from him. It is reported inside BJP circles that Mr Yeddyurappa gave as much as Rs 160 crores to the party’s 2008 state election campaign. He also allegedly financed the wedding of a senior BJP leader’s son recently, with a 25,000-strong guest list.

Mr Yeddyurappa was drunk with power and flush with money. And he used both to neutralise and control the party leadership. Even the RSS is said to have benefited from his largesse through generous donations for its new office buildings in Karnataka. Such power breeds Himalayan arrogance. This allowed Mr Yeddyurappa to muster the courage on the day he finally resigned. to smash former national BJP president M Venkaiah Naidu’s laptop and slap a party MLA

So compromised and ineffectual had the leadership become that it couldn’t even secure Mr Yeddyurappa’s resignation immediately after Lokayukta N Santosh Hegde submitted his report. The Chief Minister took his own time, in keeping with his superstitions about moonless nights, to decide he would quit four days later. Before he quit, he laid down conditions. He would choose his successor and remain the power behind the throne. He also wanted to be the party’s state president.

Mr Yeddyurappa was trying to cling to power till the very last minute He was toying with quitting the BJP and buying the support of a section of the Janata Dal (Secular), led by the odious Deve Gowda father and son duo, to form a new government. He cancelled a meeting in Delhi with Mr LK Advani, no less, to return to Bangalore to explore that possibility.

While announcing his resignation, Mr Yeddyurappa declared in the tawdry, vulgar style typical of him that Mr DV Sadananda Gowda would succeed him. Rather than countermand and rebuke him, Messsrs Arun Jaitely and Rajnath Singh, deputed by the central leadership to ensure an orderly and consensual transition, just stood and watched.

Mr Yeddyurappa, a Lingayat from Shimoga in north-central Karnataka, had no compunctions in roping in the Mutts run by the priests of that caste to tell their followers to work against another Lingayat aspirant to the Chief Minister’s job, Jagdish Shettar. Mr Yeddyurappa herded his followers into a 7-star resort outside Bangalore, a notorious site of political horse-trading, to ensure they would stay loyal.

Mr Yeddyurappa will go down in history for his many contributions to coarsening Karnataka politics and infusing a mega-dose of sleaze into it. Justice Hegde’s 464-page report, backed by over 25,000 pages of evidence, shows he was complicit in the operation of a humongous racket based on the illegal mining of iron ore and its clandestine export to China via seven ports in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu at least since 2006. His family too made crores from mining companies’ donations.

“They (the Bellary Brothers) claimed they were doing no mining in Karnataka, Justice Hegde said. “We have enough documents to the contrary.” The Brothers created what the report terms “a pool of illegalities”, including mining beyond permitted areas and in larger quantities, overloading trucks, bribing officials, faking or destroying documents, and laundering money through a network of companies based in Singapore and the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean

The mining racket proper consisted in the outright looting of 29.8 million tonnes of high-quality iron ore, worth a mind-boggling Rs 12,228 crores, without payment of royalty or taxes from April 2006 to July 2010, when exports were banned. The Reddys’ profit margin on the ore, after paying bribes, is estimated at an astronomical 1,300 percent!

This caused a direct loss to the exchequer estimated at Rs 16,085 crores. Justice Hegde has asked that this entire amount be recovered through legal proceedings against the nearly 800 officials and politicians involved.

The Reddy Brothers have been at this game for many years. They are believed to have amassed immense wealth, of the order of Rs 30,000 crores. The BJP has been the greatest beneficiary of their largesse. No wonder the BJP was loath to sack Mr Yeddyurappa, stonewalled questions on his corruption, and evaded taking a decision until the very end—when the Hegde report became public.

The indictment by a statutory authority left the BJP with no choice. But that doesn’t mean that the BJP has taken its disgracing to heart or decided to dispense with politicians of the Yeddyurappa ilk. The BJP will not only continue to do business with them, but will rely on them to push its agendas

Mr Yeddyurappa has carried money power-based politics to heights never before scaled in India. This variety of politics in admittedly not a BJP monopoly. The Congress has long practised it—for instance, under the late YS Rajasekhara Reddy. He was instrumental in creating new realty markets and boosting old ones, and in doling out infrastructure contracts to all manner of shady firms, which have recently built more large dams, airports and highways all over India than any other companies.

But Mr Yeddyurappa is special. He practises a brand of politics for which money power and Robber Baron-style criminality are not only indispensable props; they are its essential ingredients—and at the heart of the murky transactions that sustain politicians in power. Factors like caste, communalism and ethnicity help them win elections in the first place. They are necessary preconditions of power. But the exercise of power and generation of patronage is dependent on these ingredients.

At the same time, Mr Yeddyurappa is virulently communal. His education minister has made the Bhagwad Gita compulsory in schools. Those who oppose this, he says, “are free to leave our country”. Mr Yeddyurappa is even more casteist than the politicians of Uttar Pradesh too..

The malignant combination of money power, criminality and communalism has taken politics to new depths in Karnataka. And yet, unlimited money power coupled with corporate crime and plunder of public resources, cannot guarantee political pre-eminence for the BJP in Karnataka. Its social and political base in the state is relatively thin. Although it won 110 of 224 seats in the last Assembly elections (2008), it bagged a smaller vote-share (33.9 percent) than the Congress’s 34.6 percent, with 80 seats.

The BJP has a changing, chameleon-like character in Karnataka. Its original and strongest base is in Dakshina Kannada (the Southern coastal region near Mangalore-Udipi). But in 2008, it suddenly sprouted in the Northern and Central regions where the BJP’s Lingayats are strong. This happened partly because of the decline and marginalisation of Lingayat leaders in other parties, rather thanthe BJP’s independent strength. This strength may not last.

In general, the BJP has gained in Karnataka from the long-term decline of the Congress, the rise of the Janata Dal under Ramakrishna Hegde, and later, the weakening of this current thanks to a split within the JD.

The defector faction, the JD (S), led by Mr Deve Gowda and his maverick son HD Kumaraswamy, suddenly joined hands with the BJP and handed over a share of power on a platter to it. Mr Kumaraswamy was meant to give the BJP a turn of the Chief Ministership after half-time. But he refused. The BJP gained from the sympathy factor.

However, these phenomena are somewhat transient. The BJP hasn’t built an enduring strong base for itself. Its rule has been marked by bad, unresponsive and unaccountable governance, spread of communalism and decline in social indicators. Outside of Bangalore, itself a mal-developed pocket of IT success and prosperity, Karnataka remains wretchedly backward. After the present fiasco, the BJP’s future looks pretty gloomy. (IPA Service)