Says a senior leader: “We all know that there are issues with the partisan handling of elections by the Election Commission (EC) but, Gandhi even when he raises it dilutes the message because no other leader of the INDIA alliance chimes in with him. His lacklustre leadership has ensured that the INDIA alliance (which had the BJP bothered for a hot minute) is history.”
This was the scenario facing DKS, who had been promised a turn at power at the halfway mark of the government.
Public acknowledgment
Sources say DKS realised that even if pressed by the high command, Siddharamiah — ensconced in the CM’s chair — wouldn’t budge. But he wanted a public acknowledgment of the promise made to him, and more importantly, recognition that he was the party’s indisputable successor, since he sensed ambition among some senior colleagues. Interestingly, this includes Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress president. DKS also refused to give up his power base as state Congress chief and managed to scuttle Siddharamiah’s planned assertion of authority through a reshuffle.
Sources also say DKS and his loyalists had been frozen out of the government by Siddharamiah, and this will now change as DKS prepares to run a campaign to get the Congress re-elected in two years — with him as the CM face. It’s a wary truce, time bought by the intervention of Sonia Gandhi. But if past examples are any indicator — Sachin Pilot versus Ashok Gehlot, Jyotiraditya Scindia versus Kamal Nath — such pacts, and their non-implementation, have proved suicidal for the Congress in states like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
No election at halfway mark
The only reason the Karnataka government has not collapsed is that no Congress MLA wants to face an election halfway through the term and go back to an angry voter. And the voter is indeed angry — because the Congress government has been completely overwhelmed by the big fight between the two leaders, with governance going for a toss.
And the Congress high command looks on helplessly. “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats wrote in The Second Coming in 1919. It seems prophetic for the Congress party today.