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23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Fractured Crown

Between Siddaramaiah’s grip on power and Shivakumar’s restless ambition, the Karnataka Congress is trapped in a succession spiral. Karnataka Karnataka today has two chief ministers - one by office, the other by expectation. The power tussle between Siddaramaiah and his deputy, D.K. Shivakumar, has slipped so completely into the open that the Congress’s ritual denials sound like political farce. A whispered ‘understanding’ after the 2023 victory that each would get the CM’s post after...

Fractured Crown

Between Siddaramaiah’s grip on power and Shivakumar’s restless ambition, the Karnataka Congress is trapped in a succession spiral. Karnataka Karnataka today has two chief ministers - one by office, the other by expectation. The power tussle between Siddaramaiah and his deputy, D.K. Shivakumar, has slipped so completely into the open that the Congress’s ritual denials sound like political farce. A whispered ‘understanding’ after the 2023 victory that each would get the CM’s post after two-and-a-half years has hardened into a public confrontation between a chief minister determined to finish five years and a deputy increasingly unwilling to wait. The recent breakfast meeting between the two men at Siddaramaiah’s residence was presented as a truce where the ‘high command’ was invoked as the final arbiter. “There are no differences between us,” Siddaramaiah insisted, twice for emphasis. Few were convinced and soon, Shivakumar was again hinting darkly at change. For weeks, Shivakumar’s loyalists have been holding meetings, mobilising legislators and making pilgrimages to Delhi to get the Congress high command to honour its promise. They insist that the Congress leadership agreed to a rotational chief ministership in 2023 and that November 2025 was always meant to mark Shivakumar’s ascent. The high command, for its part, has perfected the art of strategic vagueness by neither confirming nor denying the pact. This suggests that the Congress does not merely hesitate to act against Siddaramaiah, but increasingly lacks the capacity to do so. From the outset of his second innings, Siddaramaiah has given no signal of easing aside. As he approaches January 2026, poised to overtake D. Devaraj Urs as Karnataka’s longest-serving chief minister, the symbolism is unmistakable. The mantle of social justice politics that Urs once embodied now firmly sits on Siddaramaiah’s shoulders. And it is this social coalition that shields him. His fortress is AHINDA - minorities, backward classes and Dalits. Leaked figures from the unreleased caste census suggest that these groups together approach or exceed two-thirds of the state’s population. Lingayats and Vokkaligas, once electorally dominant, are rendered numerical minorities in this arithmetic. Siddaramaiah governs not merely as a Congress leader, but as the putative custodian of Karnataka’s demographic majority. That claim is reinforced through policy. Minority scholarships have been revived, contractor quotas restored, residential schools expanded. More than Rs. 42,000 crore has been earmarked for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Kurubas, his own community, have been pitched for Scheduled Tribe status, with careful assurances that their elevation will not disadvantage others. DK Shivakumar brings organisational muscle, financial clout and control over the Vokkaliga heartland. In electoral campaigns, these are formidable assets. But in a confrontation with a leader who embodies a 60–70 percent social coalition, they are blunt instruments. The Congress high command understands this equation, even if it publicly pretends otherwise. It also remembers, uneasily, what Siddaramaiah did the last time his authority was constrained. In 2020, when the Congress–JD(S) coalition collapsed after 16 MLAs defected to Mumbai,13 of them hailed from Siddaramaiah’s camp. At the time, he held the post of coordination committee chairman. Instead, he emerged as the principal beneficiary of collapse, returning as Leader of the Opposition with a tighter grip on the party. If the Congress high command could not punish him then, it is doubtful it can coerce him now. Shivakumar’s predicament is thus more tragic than tactical. He is not battling a rival alone, but an entire political structure built to outlast him. The promised coronation looks increasingly like a mirage drifting just ahead of a man condemned to keep walking. For the Congress, the cost of this paralysis is already visible. A government elected on guarantees and governance is consumed by succession. The party’s authority is dissolving while its factions harden. The Congress returned to power in Karnataka after years in the wilderness, only to re-enact the same leadership dysfunction that has crippled it elsewhere. Regardless of whether Siddaramaiah survives this storm, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Congress cannot survive the slow corrosion of its command in one of the few states it holds today.

Mahayuti versus Jarange

Mahayuti versus Jarange

The political terrain in Marathwada is undergoing a seismic shift ahead of the Assembly polls. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), once the dominant force in the region, has its back to the wall following its catastrophic performance in the recent Lok Sabha election in Marathwada, where the saffron party failed to win even a single seat.


The ruling Mahayuti alliance scored just one of eight Lok Sabha in the region, with CM Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena winning the Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar seat even as the BJP scored a naught.The most prominent disruptor here was arguably Manoj Jarange-Patil, the Maratha quota activist who made good his boast of being a ‘political kingmaker.’


Despite his professed disinterest in contesting elections, Jarange-Patil is now set to supplant the established political order by fielding candidates and leveraging his influence. His year-long campaign for granting immediate reservation to Marathas within the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category had directly caused the BJP’s (and the ruling Mahayuti’s) rout in the Lok Sabha election in Marathwada, which saw big leaders like Raosaheb Danve and Pankaja Munde bite the electoral dust.


Jarange-Patil’s continued scrutiny of key BJP figures, especially his sustained verbal assault on Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, has long raised eyebrows about his hidden agenda. But the activist’s Svengali-like hold over the Maratha community, and the subsequent coalescing of an OBC versus Maratha standoff, has made it harder for BJP to walk the tightrope between placating the OBCs and appeasing the Marathas in this region.


While he will not personally contest, Jarange’s strategy involves fielding his own candidates, supporting selected candidates from other parties, and ensure the defeat of rivals. One can guess as to who Jarange’s ‘rivals’ are. Thus far, his agitation has noticeably benefited the opposition Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA).


In a region perennially bedevilled by drought and agrarian crises and industrially challenged, emotive issues have always spread like bush-fire – be it Sharad Pawar’s controversial proposal to rename Marathwada University in the 1970s to Bal Thackeray and the undivided Shiv Sena securing a foothold to the rise of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) in the 2000s. Thus, it is no surprise that the latest entrant in Marathwada’s boiling cauldron in Jarange-Patil and his Maratha agitation.


Against this fraught background, the prestige of several BJP and Mahayuti heavyweights are at stake on November 20.


For all its accusations at the Congress for being ‘a party of dynasts’, the BJP has fielded a number of scions from established political families in Marathwada: Shreejaya Chavan, daughter of former Chief Minister Ashok Chavan from the Chavan pocket borough of Bhokar in Nanded district. Chavan, who defected to the BJP from the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha, was thwarted by Maratha community activists while campaigning for the BJP candidate in the general election.


The party has gone with incumbent MLA Sambhaji Patil Nilangekar, grandson of late Congress CM Shivajirao Patil Nilangekar, in Nilanga while Dhanajay Munde, an important Vanjari OBC face and Ajit Pawar’s confidant in the NCP, will be holding the Munde family bastion in Parli.


The BJP has renominated Santosh Danve, the two-term MLA from Jalna’s Bhokardhan, and son of Raosaheb Danve. It will be interesting to watch if the son will be successful in halting the Jarange juggernaut – something which the father failed to do.

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