Former Chief Minister of Karnataka Jagadish Shettar, who recently joined the Congress, said here on Saturday, June 10, that the BJP was under the clutches of a handful of people and it would reap the same results in the Parliamentary elections as in the Assembly elections.
Speaking at a seminar organised by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Research and Extension Centre of the University of Mysore, Mr. Shettar said that he had made this remark when he quit the party before the elections and nothing seems to have changed since then and it is certain the party would suffer another loss in the coming elections.
The BJP’s growth in Karnataka, he said, was due to a strong network of workers and local leadership which helped it to sustain the momentum provided by the Ayodhya movement in the 1990s while in other southern States it had little impact as there was no State leadership there. ‘’To believe that one could win elections on the Hindutva plank and the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Parliamentary elections and local leadership or local issues was not required, was a mistake for which the BJP will pay,’’ he added.
He traced the genesis of the BJP in Karnataka since the Jan Sangh days and said there were local leaders who worked to build the party. But today there was absence of second line of leadership in the BJP, he added.
Purushottam Bilimale, writer and former professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University said that academicians have a duty in highlighting the failures of the government but they have failed to rise up to the task when an issue arose. He cited the example of the deafening silence of historians when Uri Gowda and Nanje Gowda were being foisted by the BJP to rewrite a chunk of history as a case in point.
Similarly, economists should have highlighted the fact that though Karnataka has a budget size of ₹3.10 lakh crore there was inequities in society. He said while 80 per cent of the women in labour force were in agriculture, 54 per cent suffered from malnutrition but these aspects were not flagged by the experts in the universities.
Prof. Bilimale said while creation of additional jobs were promised in the BJP manifesto, it actually resulted in job loss and it was not flagged by the critics.
Prof. Bilimale said in the run up to the elections, efforts were made to distort the legacy of Karnataka of cultural inclusiveness by creating divisions in society. Hence, a few likeminded people joined together to form ‘Wake up Karnataka’ to question historical distortions and educate the voters of the pluralistic nature of the State, he added.
