Karnataka Assembly election results | BJP’s southern charge blunted Premium

As soon as definitive trends from the Karnataka Assembly polls came out, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai conceded defeat to the Congress and promised that the party would learn from its mistakes and plan for the Lok Sabha polls of 2024.

As soon as definitive trends from the Karnataka Assembly polls came out, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai conceded defeat to the Congress and promised that the party would learn from its mistakes and plan for the Lok Sabha polls of 2024. For the BJP, these polls in Karnataka were just as existentially important as for the Congress as the State was its only bastion in southern India, and its presence there was a strong argument to fight the perception of the BJP being a Hindi-speaking party. The loss in Karnataka will hit the BJP in terms of the perception of it being a largely north Indian party, out of touch with the political and cultural sensibilities of the southern States, and some of the messages from the Chief Ministers of southern States have touched upon those themes.

The State unit of the BJP in Karnataka may well say that they will learn from the mistakes and the party may well do as well as it did the last time around in Karnataka in the Lok Sabha polls (when the party won 24 out of 28 seats) due to the immense popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the State, but for the national leadership, the problem goes beyond that.

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The first challenge for the BJP in the south, in the wake of these results, will be in Telangana, where Assembly polls are to be held later this year. In the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP won four seats in that State and has been on an aggressive campaign pitch for the Greater Hyderabad Municipal polls; bypolls to the Assembly seats; and the upcoming Assembly elections, asserting that it would be the party to beat in the face of a very strong presence of the Bharatha Rashtra Samithi (BRS).

Internal meetings of the BJP with Telangana leaders has shown up the fact that the party has very few of its own candidates for Assembly seats and the bypolls that it had won in the past — Huzurabad and Dubbak — had candidates who started their political life from the erstwhile Telangana Rashtra Samithi (rechristened as BRS). The idea was that a defeat for the Congress in Karnataka could boost the prospects of wholesale defections to the BJP, demoralising the Congress further and making the BJP, if not a winner, then at least the official number two party in Telangana. That battle seems more of an uphill task after the Karnataka results.

The southern States account for 140 Lok Sabha seats, of which the BJP has 28 as of now (29, if one counts the Mandya Lok Sabha MP Sumalatha Ambareesh as an Independent candidate supported by the BJP). With the BJP’s alliances in Bihar and Maharashtra broken, the party has been casting a wide net for the next Lok Sabha polls, areas where newer seats can be won. For the last few months, senior BJP leaders have been hobnobbing with cultural icons and social sector leaders of the southern States, especially in Hyderabad and Kerala, and in Tamil Nadu, to fight a perception battle of being a Hindi belt party. The absence of a large social group sticking to the BJP, as the Lingayats had done in Karnataka starting in the late 1990s, has hobbled the BJP’s efforts. The Karnataka results, with the Congress beating the BJP on an intensely local campaign with strong overtones of regionalism versus Delhi, including the Amul versus Nandini milk cooperative controversy, does not appear to look good for the party in the southern States.

The irony in the situation is that the BJP claims it’s a party with a national footprint, but it will have to identify hyper locally with each of the southern States to make headway — a tricky balancing act.