Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, who completed two years in office on Wednesday, will find the going get tougher by the day. Two elections are looming large on the horizon, and neither augurs well.
The first is a prestige issue. The state government has been directed by the Supreme Court to hold elections to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) within August 5, something that Siddaramaiah has been stalling for a while. Being asked to hold elections, itself, is a loss of face for him.
The Supreme Court has set aside an order of a division bench of the High Court which had earlier given the state government and the state election commission a breather of six months. The bench itself had over-ruled a single-judge bench order asking the government and the commission to hold elections by May 31. A review petition has been filed in the apex court, but if that too is dismissed he will have to hold elections to the palike which the Cabinet had dissolved in April only six days before its term was to expire. Siddaramaih has been pushed into a corner, and the hardy survivor knows it too well.
The Chief Minister has an ambitious plan for capital Bengaluru: he wants to split up the municipal corporation that runs the city into three. But his plans ran into a roadblock when the Bill seeking the BBMP's trifurcation failed to be passed in the House during an emergency legislative session, and instead landed in the lap of the BJP-JDS opposition which has the numbers in the legislative council.
But now, not only does the Congress have to abide by the court's ruling, the party has slim chances of pulling off a victory. It had been a downslide for the Congress under Siddaramaiah from the very beginning. The government has been accused of being in a slumber since day one, and with every passing day the political advantage has been tilting towards the BJP, which in spite of losing control of the state in 2013 had still managed to win 12 of the 28 Assembly seats in Bengaluru city. Then, it grabbed all three Lok Sabha seats from the state capital a year later, besides winning 17 of the 28 seats in the state. If that’s not all, 113 of the dissolved palike’s 198 corporators were from the BJP, which is waiting for the chance to reap political dividend from the unceremonious dissolution of the corporation.
No party in power at the state level has lost civic elections in the capital since 1983. Siddaramaiah does not want to become an exception to the rule. A defeat would not only reflect badly on his leadership at the state level, it would be as much a referendum about his own performance. After all, he himself holds all the crucial ministerial portfolios governing the city’s main civic agencies – BBMP, the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) and the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB).
The litmus test for Siddaramaiah, however, will be the polls to 94,458 seats in 5,844 gram panchayats that will be held in two phases over May 29 and June 2. Issues in parliamentary elections are different from those in corporation and panchayat polls, and the latter are held on a non-party basis, but either way the party’s electoral performance will decide whether Siddaramaiah loses his stranglehold over it.
