Shocked by the miserable defeat in the Karnataka Assembly elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party is set to hold State-level and Assembly constituency-level meetings of its candidates and leaders to decipher the reasons for its loss.
BJP State president Nalin Kumar Kateel told media persons in Bengaluru on Sunday that the meeting would be held within a few days and appealed to party workers to analyse the reasons for the debacle and also prepare for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Meanwhile, an informal meeting of party leaders and a few MLAs-elect was held in Bengaluru on Sunday. According to sources, the opinion expressed was that the manner in which the Congress “guarantees” (prominent poll promises) were reached to people was one of the main reasons for the BJP’s defeat, apart from the wave of anti-incumbency.
The Congress announced one guarantee at a time and “guarantee cards” too were reached to people to create awareness about them. “In fact, the guarantees of the Congress were being widely debated even before the party released its formal manifesto,” a prominent State leader of the BJP, who participated in the Sunday’s meeting, told The Hindu.
How caste factor worked
The meeting also observed that there was a widespread wave of anti-incumbency. It also felt that the SC community rallied behind the Congress because of Dalit leader M. Mallikarjun Kharge’s presence while some of these communities, including Banjaras, were up in arms against the BJP as they were not happy with internal reservation among the SCs taken up by the party government.
“Our main support base of Lingayats did not remain intact due to the aggressive campaign by the Congress over the alleged sidelining of veteran leader B.S. Yediyurappa and not giving the ticket to prominent Lingayat leaders Jagadish Shettar and Laxman Savadi,” the leader observed. This was evident with the defeat of the party’s candidates in the Lingayat-dominant areas, he pointed out.
Vokkaliga heartland
Some of the BJP leaders also felt that the aggressive campaign by the party to make inroads in the Vokkaliga-dominated areas of Old Mysore region where the JD(S) had an influence also worked against the party. Though these efforts helped the BJP to snatch some votes from the JD(S), it resulted in the JD(S) losing the battle to the Congress. The seats that could have been won by the JD(S) went to the Congress, they felt.
