Election 2023: How rival parties in Karnataka found, lost and nurtured social groups over the years

In less than a month, Karnataka will vote to elect a new assembly. As is the case with all large-scale electoral exercises in India, a wide range of factors will shape the nature of popular verdict. Political parties and contestants will be alert to how perceptions around different issues – governance, development, identity politics – will impact their chances.

At the same time, the key rivals in the fray – the Bharatiya Janata Party,  Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) – will be careful in seeing how the major constituents of their support base can again bring them consolidated votes. As in other parts of the country, the cultivation of electorally significant social groups has been a subtext to the tale of electoral battles in Karnataka over the last seven decades. 

In the last few weeks, the BJP-led state government’s decision to rejig reservation quotas has largely been seen as a pre-poll move to either strengthen, or seek, support from some caste groups. But distributing such benefits within quota limits is a tough task in the face of different claims. Moreover, the responses to such rejigs aren’t always well-informed. This means such moves tend to have unintended consequences too. 

This again foregrounds how, in the post-independence years of electoral politics, key political forces in the state have sought to build social coalitions. In fact, the process can be traced back to how the Congress party approached the formation of the larger state of Mysore in 1956, renamed as Karnataka only in 1973. 

On the back of the Ekikaran (unification) movement spearheaded by a Lingayat group within the Congress and the State Reorganisation Committee’s report of 1955, the Kannada-speaking regions in Madras, Bombay and Hyderabad were integrated into the enlarged Mysore state. This meant the land-owning caste groups of Vokkaligas – until then the largest in the state – now had to contend with political influence with the presence of the Lingayats as a large and powerful caste group in non-Mysore parts of the state.

The Congress responded by accommodating both. After all, the Vokkaligas and Lingayats were both dominant caste groups that became the social base of the party’s hold over power in the first two decades after independence.

The dominance of the Lingayat-Vokkaliga equation axis was evident in sheer numbers. From 1952 to 1972, as political commentator Nalin Mehta wrote in The New BJP, Lingayats accounted for an average of 31 percent of the state’s legislators. Vokkaligas comprised 27.9 percent. While Lingayats constituted 15.5 percent of the state population in 1952, and Vokkaligas 12.9 percent, Lingayats are now 17-19 percent of the population and Vokkaligas around 15 percent.

Later decades saw the widening of the social base of leadership and the subsequent political rise of other caste groups. But the imprint of this initial dominance is seen in other data. Before the reorganisation, between 1947 and 1956, two chief ministers were Vokkaligas. After reorganisation, from 1956 to 2021, nine out of 20 chief ministers were Lingayats – about 45 percent.

It was in the early 1970s that the Congress had to think about a different social base. This was due to the altered political scene in Karnataka after a 1969 split in the party, when powerful Lingayat leader S Nijalingappa left the Congress. The party had its doubts about the assured support of a major segment of Lingayats. So, under the leadership of new chief minister Devaraj Urs in 1972, it moved away from its traditional social base to build a new social coalition of support. This was Ahinda, an acronym for Alpasankhyataru (minorities), Hindulidavaru (backward classes) and Dalitaru (Dalits).

The shift was evident in the Urs-led Congress government’s decision to appoint the state’s first Backward Classes Commission headed by LG Havanur and therefore popularly called the Havanur Commission. It identified 128 backward castes, 15 backward communities, and 62 backward tribes for reservation benefits in the state. 

In the meantime, a major part of Lingayat support had shifted to the Janata Party, which was at the vanguard of the anti-Congress campaign. By the late Eighties, the Congress tried to win back Lingayat support by making Veerendra Patil the chief minister in 1989. This effort was severely damaged by Patel’s unceremonious removal from office in October 1990. When this decision was announced at a press conference at Bangalore airport, the ouster was perceived as an insult to Lingayat pride. The Nineties therefore saw the social group further drifting away from the Congress.

Even if Lingayat voters couldn’t be categorised as a unified voting block, the drift had serious consequences. Over time, the votes were divided between the Janata Party and the Janata Dal, and later HD Deve Gowda’s JDS and the ascendent BJP, which was steered in Karnataka by Lingayat leaders like BS Yediyurappa.

The BJP was looking to build a wider Hindu identity support base in Karnataka. It was eager to grow beyond being seen as a Brahmin party. While the movements around the Idgah Maidan issue helped it galvanise a section of Hindu voters in some areas, the party also needed consolidated support groups among different castes. So, efforts to enlist the support of Lingayat voters was supplemented by reaching out to Vokkaligas through HN Nanjegowda as well as seeking Dalit leaders too. 

That, however, didn’t mean quick success. For instance, the Vokkaligas in Old Mysuru are a stronghold for the JDS in southern Karnataka. In the upcoming election, the BJP will try to make inroads here. Old Mysuru, spread over eight districts and 48 assembly constituencies, hasn’t yielded a double-digit seat tally for the party yet.

The Congress has been relying on the wider Ahinda social base in its electoral strategy. But the first past the post system has created a tricky situation for the party. The evenly spread nature of its vote base means that while its support is dispersed across OBC groups like Kurubas, Dalits and Muslims in the state, it isn’t concentrated densely in a region-specific cluster of constituencies. This is unlike the Lingayat voter base which is concentrated in 70 constituencies and having some sway over a few more. In electoral terms, this resulted in situations where even after getting a higher vote share in the 2004, 2008 and 2018 assembly polls, the Congress won fewer seats than the BJP.

With the latest reworking of affirmative action quotas, one is reminded of how parties have eyed key social groups through such exercises. These strategies have largely revolved around implementing or improvising the recommendations of backward classes commissions. Besides the Havanur Commission of 1975, two others were constituted: the Venkataswamy Commission (1986) and the Justice Chinnappa Reddy Commission (1990). In the process, many caste groups, including the Vokkaligas, were recognised as backward classes and qualified for quota benefits. 

But their proportionate shares of benefits were different and clubbed into various categories. In 1994, when enacting the Justice Chinnappa Reddy Commission report, the Deve Gowda-led Janata Dal government rearranged the configuration like so – category 1 (four percent), 2A (15 percent), 2B (four percent), 3A (four percent), and 3B (five percent).

In the latest rejig, the BJP government has done away with the 2B category and moved Muslims, the exclusive beneficiaries of this quota, to the Economically Weaker Sections category of reservations. The four percent of this now-scrapped quota was given to the newly formed categories of 2C and 2D, renaming 3A and 3B. So, the 2C (formerly 3A) quota has gone up from four to six percent. 2D (formerly 3B) has gone from five to seven percent.

Though not exclusively, these categories with enhanced benefits are Vokkaliga and Veerashaiva-Lingayat beneficiaries.

But contrary to popular perception, the current rejig doesn’t mean that backward class Mulims are not a part of quota benefits. They are – it’s only the exclusively religion-based quota of 2B that has been discarded. As Khalid Anis Ansari writes in the Times of India, “Category 1 and Category 2A already includes many backward class Muslims and both these categories have not been tampered with.”

Ansari, who teaches sociology at Azim Premji University, is of the view that the scrapped category was a move by the Deve Gowda government to woo upper caste Ashrafs (within the Muslim community), while the BJP’s current move is an effort to woo Lingayats and Vokkaligas. “The moralist and procedural charge of the debate must not blind us to the fact that both the insertion of 2B in 1994 by the Janata Dal government and the more recent scrapping by the BJP are politically motivated: in the former, the Ashraf sections were being appeased, in the latter, the Lingayats and Vokkaligas are,” he observes.

At the same time, there has been considerable misconception on the quota benefits for the newly created 2C and 2D being exclusively marked towards Vokkaligas and Veerashaiva-Lingayats. This is not the case. This report in the Hindu quotes a senior Karnataka minister as saying that all communities within the previous 3A and 3B have been moved to 2C and 2D, respectively, as a “separate category of reservation isn’t possible within the existing 32 percent reservation matrix”.

As the Hindu noted: “The Kodavas and Balijas along with Vokkaligas, who were part of 3A and shared the 4% reservation, have been moved to the newly created 2C, which now has a total of 6% quota. Similarly, Marathas, Christians, Bunts, Jains and Satanis along with Veerashaiva-Lingayats in 3D and shared 5% reservation, have been moved to 2D, which now has 7%.”

The coming weeks will witness various subtexts, personalities and issues claiming a key role in Karnataka’s electoral battle. But parties won’t lose sight of consolidating core groups of voter mobilisation. The latest quota rejig may be a small part of a far longer process to build social coalitions for electoral politics in the state. It’s a process that is still fluid with too many social groups seeking their say in power politics. And rival parties continue to either work on consolidating their claims on support, or on making fresh inroad into new support groups.