The Modi government had inducted three faces from Uttar Pradesh in the Union Council of Ministers last year and also among the 19 ministers inducted in the council, five were Dalits, three belonged to the Other Backward Castes and two from the Scheduled Tribes. The calculation behind these moves was to gain an edge in the Assembly elections that were held in UP earlier this year and it paid off. The BJP buried all its opponents, including the strong BSP of Mayawati, to win an overwhelming majority in the Assembly.
In 2017, the BJP is similarly looking at Mission Karnataka which is scheduled to take place next year. If reports are to be believed, the southern state, which already has three central ministers, would get a few more slots at the Centre as a plan by Modi to gain its blessings in the Assembly elections due in less than a year.
The BJP, which had won power in Karnataka in 2008 for the first time but squandered it away in five years, has a prestige battle in hand. Even though it has succeeded in putting the Congress under pressure in various corners of the country, Karnataka is one state where it has not been able to match the leadership of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. It lost both the by-elections in the state (Nanjangud and Gundlupet) in March this year despite serious erosion in the Congress's ranks.
The party, which saw as many as three chief ministers when it was in power between 2008 and 2013, is still not stable enough under the leadership of former chief minister BS Yeddyurappa who had personally campaigned for the by-polls. The BJP was split over the re-entry of Yeddyurappa as patriarch Lal Krishna Advani was not happy with his tainted record and the by-election results showed that the Lingayat strongman could not succeed to ensure that the entire community voted for the saffron party.
This now makes it challenging for the Modi-Amit Shah duo to place the BJP in a better position in Karnataka and increasing representation from the state seems the best available option now to tackle the shrewd Siddaramaiah.
BJP insiders have suggested that people like Prabhakar B Kore, Suresh Angadi, B Sriramulu, PC Mohan and Nalin Kumar Kateel are under consideration for central posts. All of them belong to the either Lingayat community or scheduled tribes or backward classes and the Modi government is eyeing to incentivise the electorate of the state in both the 2018 Assembly and 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The BJP is also keeping a watch on the Vokkaliga community, the other large one in the state, by considering an additional responsibility for former Karnataka chief minister and current Union minister DV Sadananda Gowda.
So, the BJP is actually playing a top-down strategy of inclusion by doing Karnataka favours at the Centre since its state chapter has not been much successful in mobilising a favourable public opinion. Yeddyurappa has failed to produce anything magical till now and Amit Shah's dream of the BJP bagging 150 seats in the state Assembly in the next election now rests on the shoulders of Modi.
The NDA government's likely move to bring to the fore another Lingayat face shows that the top BJP leadership is not very confident about Yeddyurappa's success. Siddaramaiah's well-calculated strategy of supporting the call by a section of the Lingayats to be recognised as a separate religion has also put the BJP in a spot and the reshuffle now could be Modi's only option to neutralise Siddaramaiah's appeal. The Linagayats have no representation in Modi's ministry since the alleged sacking of GM Siddeshwara in July 2016.
Whether the expansion of Karnataka's representation at the Centre will help the BJP return to power in 2018 is for the future to tell. Since a similar in UP where the BJP had no credible local face paid off in UP, Modi and Shah will hope that the same will happen in Karnataka as well. But politics is a game of great uncertainty and Siddaramaiah is not an opponent who will let it go easily.
