Congress looks for a Lingayat face to fill BS Yeddyurappa's space

Bengaluru, Jun 3: With the BJP looking to push its state president BS Yeddyurappa to Margdarshak Mandal, the Congress sees a huge opportunity in promoting a Lingayat leader who can fill the opposition leader’s shoes. The party desperately needs a Lingayat leader to stay relevant — especially in north Karnataka — considering the BJP swept all 14 Lok Sabha seats dominated by the community.

“The 2018 assembly polls and the recent general elections show the party can no longer rely only on Ahinda (Kannada acronym for minorities, backward classes and dalits) votes,” said a senior Congress leader. “It also needs the support of dominant Vokkaliga and Lingayat communities to win elections. The two communities have, in recent times, largely supported the JD(S) and BJP respectively. We need to promote influential leaders from these communities to wean voters back.”

The party already began work in this direction prior to the Lok Sabha polls by appointing Lingayat leader MB Patil as the home minister, party sources said.

Following a meeting in March this year, sources say the party decided to sideline leaders like HK Patil, Basavaraj Rayaraddi, SR Patil, Shamanur Shivashankarappa and Sharan Prakash Patil — Lingayat faces in Siddaramaiah’s government. The party instead penciled in four leaders — MB Patil, Vinay Kulkarni, Eshwar Khandre and SS Mallikarjuna — to shoulder the leadership role of the community. But with the defeat of Kulkarni and Khandre in the Lok Sabha polls, the party has very few names to go on with.

Politically influential, the Lingayat community comprises around 17% of Karnataka’s population and has loyally supported the BJP. The Siddaramaiah government’s perceived bid to drive a wedge in the community by offering Veerashaiva Lingayats the status of a separate religion, did not work. In fact, it consolidated the community votes against the Congress.

Now, with the BJP looking to relegate Yeddyurappa, the Congress is hoping history will repeat itself — this time by favouring them. In 1989, the Congress, led by prominent Lingayat leader Veerendra Patil, won one of its biggest victories in the assembly elections. Patil was credited with mobilising the community as the Congress won 179 of the 224 seats.

The unceremonious dismissal of the Patil government the very next year by then Congress president Rajiv Gandhi saw the Lingayat community move away from the Congress. This resulted in one of its most humiliating defeats when it won a mere 36 seats in the 1994 elections. The loss in vote share amounted to a staggering 17%, which was shared predominantly by the BJP and the Janata Dal. The Congress has never been able to recover the ground it lost then.