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T V R Shenoy

The BJP has hard decisions to make wherever its
ally is a strong regional party

It may seem a little too early to speak of the monsoon when the full blazing splendour of summer is yet to hit Delhi. But meteorologists have already begun their preparations and so may we. And my forecast for the Vajpayee ministry is: "Stormy weather ahead!"

The tempests to come would be the work of current allies so much as of acknowledged foes. As we know, the monsoon hits the south-eastern part of India first. And it is here we must turn. Not Kerala, where neither the BJP nor any of its allies has too much of a presence today. But that isn't true of Karnataka, and it is in this state, the BJP's southern bastion, that I foresee trouble.

True, the BJP's alliance with Ramakrishna Hegde's Lok Shakti paid off spectacularly. The allies won 16 of Karnataka's 28 seats, with the BJP getting 13 and Lok Shakti getting three. But that same success may have sown the seeds of a future conflict of interest.

The general election results clearly exposed the weakness of the ruling Janata Dal, which won only three seats. It will be a simple matter, if so desired, to manoeuvre Chief Minister J H Patel out of his chair. But what happens then?

The BJP wants a fresh assembly poll as soon as possible. But Lok Shakti believes a fresh ministry can be formed in the life of the current assembly by organising defections from the Janata Dal. How does one reconcile these diametrically different positions?

The Lok Shakti position is quite understandable. The party itself was created by former Janata Dal members after Hegde's expulsion. He kept in touch with MLAs through the years of Deve Gowda's ascendency. Given a chance, most of those legislators would flock to Hegde's banner once again.

That, from the Lok Shakti point of view, would kill two birds with one stone. The party would immediately win control of a large and prosperous state. And when the much-dreaded assembly poll is due, as it must by late 1999, Lok Shakti MLAs will be ideally placed to insist on the principle that sitting legislators shouldn't be deprived of a ticket.

Now, look at the BJP's reasoning. The party did substantially better than its partner. It won 13 of the 18 Lok Sabha seats it contested, whereas the Lok Shakti tally was three out of 10. It just doesn't make sense to tamely surrender a majority of the assembly seats.

That is why BJP strategists want a fresh poll as soon as possible. They can then insist on taking all those assembly segments in which it led in the general election, thus consolidating the party's hold on Karnataka.

The differences of opinion won't end even assuming that Lok Shakti and the BJP can solve the knotty problem described above. Hegde wants R V Deshpande to succeed Patel (either as chief minister of a defection-created ministry or chief ministerial candidate of the BJP-Lok Shakti front in the polls). Here, caste raises its ugly head again.

Deshpande is a Brahmin. So are Hegde himself and H N Ananth Kumar of the BJP, the two full fledged Cabinet ministers from Karnataka in the Vajpayee government. It won't go down well with the Lingayats, one of Karnataka's two dominant castes, if Patel (a fellow Lingayat) is replaced by yet another Brahmin. Here, it may be relevant to note that the senior BJP leader in the state, Yediyurappa, is a Lingayat.

One compromise being heard is that Hegde engineer defections from the Janata Dal but offer the chief minister's chair to someone from the BJP. But BJP leaders are fighting shy of accepting.

Such an administration will be shaky at the best of times. It will definitely sully the party's image in Karnataka. Finally, it still leaves open the vexed question of ticket distribution in the inevitable polls. Postponing a decision to 1999 is no solution.

Ironically, the beneficiary of this shadow-boxing and fine balancing of caste interests is the man who presided over this party's debacle in the Lok Sabha poll. As long as differences of opinion persist between Lok Shakti and the BJP, they can't afford to remove Chief Minister Patel.

Pardon me for going into such detail over Karnataka, but the state presents a glimpse of the BJP's dilemma in miniature. Orissa, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Bihar, even perhaps Andhra Pradesh -- the BJP has hard decisions to make wherever its ally is a strong regional party.

T V R Shenoy