Column

"Earth is bound to shake when a big banyan tree falls," goes the saying, made infamous by Rajiv Gandhi when he reasoned on the anti-Sikh riots that erupted after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. BJP could well be feeling that way in the coming days as its tallest leader in Karnataka was put behind bars on charges of corruption.

BJP's big plans of conquering the southern states riding piggy-back on Yeddyurappa's successes in Karnataka lay shattered as the first BJP chief minister south of the Vindhyas lay disgraced. This may lead to fears of the party losing its ground in Karnataka, the first – and the only – BJP-ruled state in the south.

The party leadership has no one to blame but themselves for the blunders they continued to commit with the sole ambition of clinging to power by hook or by crook. BJP patriarch LK Advani will be in the state within a fortnight on his 'Jana Chetana' Yatra advocating a people's movement for clean governance, targeting Congress as the evil to be destroyed. This disgrace couldn't have come at a worse time for the party, which is trying to regain its dominating heights in the fight against Congress-led UPA government on the issue of fighting corruption. Advani will have a lot to explain as his rath traverses the state. The grand old man of BJP could have avoided this embarrassment had the party practiced what it preached – a party of principles and not of persons.

Vajpayee's exit from active politics, erosion of Advani's authority within the party, and bickering within the second-rung leadership comprising Narendra Modi, Nitin Gadkari, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley, has reduced the party to be a pale shadow of what it was. In its hurry to turn the cadre-based party into a mass-based one, the leadership has allowed many a weed to creep in, and the degeneration of a leader of Yeddyurappa's stature (he started as a humble RSS worker), best reflects the rot that has set in.

It was a party which prided itself over never encouraging personality cult and nepotism. But with the party seniors in Delhi turning a blind eye to Yeddyurappa's blunders for fear of a backlash from the dominant Lingayat community (to which he belongs) has now left BJP with no leader worth a mention to steer the party back to strength in Karnataka.

With Yeddyurappa disgraced, the party's image has suffered immense damage. Worse, no alternative leader of Yeddyurappa's stature is available to redeem the party. With time running out for the next assembly elections (just 16 months away), chief minister DV Sadananda Gowda has a huge challenge ahead. And how he tackles it will make or break his political prospects as well as his party's fortunes in the state.