With just about a month to go for the Assembly polls in Karnataka, as Siddaramaiah’s Lingayat card has queered the pitch for the BJP, the saffron party is taking the battle to the Chief Minister’s own turf through aggressively wooing his castemen — the Other Backward Classes (OBC) —and seeking to puncture his AHINDA credentials. AHINDA is a Kannada acronym for minorities, backward classes and Dalits.
Just as in Gujarat, while the BJP is all out trying to lure the OBCs, who are traditional Congress backers, BJP president Amit Shah has been challenging Siddaramaiah’s identity as a backward class leader saying that the latter’s focus has only been on the well-being of the minorities. Addressing an OBC convention at Kaginele in Haveri district, 350 km from Bengaluru, Shah alleged that OBCs have been neglected in the State at the cost of Muslim appeasement pursued by the Congress Government. “The Chief Minister calls himself AHINDA but he is he is only worried about welfare of minorities,” Shah charged.
The Congress, however, asserts that the BJP’s efforts would not cut much ice with the targeted voters as they recognise Siddaramaiah as the main OBC leader in the State. The dominant OBCs play a decisive role in Karnataka polls. AHINDA politics came to the fore in Karnataka in the 70s when the Lingayats (17 per cent) and Vokkaligas (12 to 15 per cent) moved away from the Congress. The State’s first backward leader Devraj Urs of Congress then invented AHINDA to continue the winning spree of the party.
Siddaramaiah has sought to adopt AHINDA with some improvisations. The calculation is that away from Lingayats, BJP’s vote base, and Vokkaligas (OBCs), largely Deve Gowda’s JD(S) stronghold, Dalits and tribals still make for a winning combination of around 38-39 per cent of the State’s population. Muslims and Christians constitute 14.79 per cent, Scheduled Castes 17.14 per cent and Scheduled Tribes 6.95 per cent of the population.
But not all Dalits vote for the Congress. Dalits, called Left ha-nd and also known as Madigas, generally vote for the BJP while the Congress draws support from the Chalavadi caste, described as Right hand Dalits.
This apart, BSP’s tie up with the JD(S) would also likely to fragment Dalit votes in the State. Last time also, though the BSP did not win a seat, it received 30,000-odd votes. JD(S) leader and former Prime Minister Deve Gowda thinks BSP’s presence would help the party win more than 40 seats. The Congress, however, sees JD(S) as the B-team of the BJP, which would ‘divide secular votes’ in the State.
Shah’s move to woo OBCs is to consolidate and add to its vote base of Upper caste, Lingayats and left hand Dalits. The BJP president, in his election meetings, assured OBCs in Karnataka that his party would pass the pending Bill to accord Constitutional status to the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC). Shah alleged that it was the Congress insistence to include minority representation that had blocked the bill in the upper house. Presently, the NCBC, a statutory body created in 1993, is given limited powers to only recommend to the Government whether a community be included or not in the central list of OBCs.
To fail the BJP attempts to cultivate OBC segments, the Congress sees projection of Chief Minister hailing from one of the largest OBC segment Kurbas, constituting eight per cent of the population, would carry the day for it.
But BJP State leaders stress that Kurbas have been like ‘Yadavas’ in UP. They have cornered all the benefits of OBC reservation to themselves which is detrimental to the interests of other OBCs in the State. BJP functionaries alleged Kurbas have benefited in getting key jobs in the State and in promotion in the services. Besides, Kurbas’s interests are antagonistic to those of Dalits in the State, they said disproving that the AHINDA would favour the Congress.
In the wake of Patidar agitation for reservation in Gujarat, the BJP had in last year’s poll similarly tried to attract OBC leaders in the State, which had for a long under Narendra Modi as Chief Minister did not see a similar caste polarisation. The Congress had successfully pulled away OBC leader AlpeshThakor from the BJP and formed an alliance with him and Dalit leader JigneshMevani.