Elections rarely resolve the most current or pressing questions of the time, or they bring muddled answers. Yet when Karnataka makes its way to the hustings tomorrow in the first of a three-phase poll process, many will hope for clarity on some matters. Will it be a vote for stability, in a state that has seen three governments in the last four years? Will it be a verdict on coalitions? Everyone remembers the petty tumult caused by the JD(S) in successive governing arrangements with the Congress and BJP. Will the BJP secure its impressive foothold in the state? The Congress still has a more pervasive presence across the state. Will the significant increase of seats in the Bangalore region after the delimitation exercise reduce political indifference to India’s only city to become a verb?To be sure, those are not the only questions in Karnataka today. The state is divided into at least six distinct regions. The end of Congress dominance in the state, after the formation of the first non-Congress government in 1983, set in motion the process of each region developing its own political identity. Politics has travelled closer to the people. But it is also true that neither politics nor policy has significantly moderated glaring inter-regional disparities. The Hyderabad-Karnataka region, a traditional Congress bastion, remains a laggard in development, for instance. Then, ever since Devraj Urs’s successful attempts to mobilise disadvantaged groups in the early ’70s, political competition has become more inclusive in the state. A rainbow coalition of castes and communities has come to stay in the corridors of power, where the principle of power-sharing has become entrenched. This has ensured that leaders from a broad range of social groups exercise substantive influence in politics and policy. The growing ethnicisation of a party like the JD(S) may represent a reversal of the trend. And the BJP’s mobilisation style may put pressure on the state’s broad coalitions.Plus, Karnataka’s Bangalore question is more piquant than is realised. Institutions of rural self-governance have a long history in the state, culminating in the 1983 act under the Hegde government whose provisions were borrowed by the framers of the 73rd Amendment to the Indian Constitution. Yet, even as the state has made a pioneering effort to operationalise the meaning of the 73rd Amendment, it has spectacularly ignored the call of the 74th Amendment on urban local government. Karnataka desperately needs a government that can help the people take ownership of its cities as centres of dynamism and growth for the whole state.
