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ShareThe second of the five or six promises that the Reddy brothers extracted from BS Yeddyurappa has been met. After VP Baligar, his principal secretary, it was the turn of Shobha Karandlaje, the rural development minister, to resign as part of the deal.
That, as she evocatively asked at her exit press conference, there were no questions either about her efficiency or probity is besides the point. Proximity to the power centre, as she has discovered, can sometimes prove costly.
While the first two points in the deal were pretty easy to fulfil -- they merely needed unilateral action by the chief minister -- the next few items on that list will truly determine how far the truce between Yeddyurappa and the Reddy brothers will hold.
The first in that sequence will be establishing a coordination committee. The composition of that is probably an already settled issue, but you can still expect some jockeying to secure a majority within that core group. Right now, if one goes by the names doing the rounds, it seems the core committee is loaded against the chief minister but may finally be structured to keep a balance between the two factions.
It is after this stage that you can figure who the real winner of this round of squabble is. That is when the core group will have to decide, first, who else has to be shown the door from the ministry, and even more importantly, who is to replace them.
In order to recover some ground after having been battered by the dissidents, the chief minister is bound to try and protect those who were loyal to him during the crisis and fight every inch to achieve that end.
The Reddy brothers have an even bigger task at hand. Herding disgruntled elements in a fight against the leadership is one thing, but sharing the spoils in the form of ministerial berths is tougher. They will have to bring all the skills and the clout they have to turn that disgruntled lot into a loyal flock.
That is easier said than done and if they fail to handle it well, the dissident group itself may face internal tensions. Right now it looks like the ruling party has become a coalition of interest groups with the potential to be riven by all the pulls and pressures of a coalition government; a description the Congress used somewhat prematurely for the current shape of the BJP government.
Even though the last word on the war within the BJP is yet to be pronounced, what is of interest, more than academic interest, in fact, is the phenomenon of the unraveling of the leadership.
Just three weeks ago, Yeddyurappa was like a knight in shining armour. He ran the government and the party the way he wanted, and had the full backing of the party high command in whatever he did. He was almost beyond questioning. On top of that, he also sent out the right emotional signals on handling the devastating floods in northern Karnataka. There was grudging admiration for him even in the opposition parties.
If all that unravelled in a fortnight and if the chief minister looks more and more chastened, there are many obvious reasons that have been extensively discussed.
One very obvious reason that everyone can see for sure, but the leaders themselves do not, is their self-importance and an exaggerated notion of their abilities and strength. As toadies pump them up and praise their intelligence and wisdom, leaders begin to believe that to be true and that they could be another Chanakya in the making. That is when they start asserting their position as if there could be no challenge, the point at which they become somewhat myopic. It is the inability to see the limits of leadership that cause the kind of problems that Yeddyurappa faced.
As all leaders who have been battered do, the chief minister now swears that he will turn a new leaf. If he really does that and demonstrates that he can be accommodating, he may still be able to recover some lost ground. The Reddy brothers, on the other hand, will have much more on their plate.
To start with, they have to convince their supporters that they are trustworthy at all times and can actually find a better bargain for them and somehow keep the group and its morale intact until that is achieved. It takes a lot more than mere material resources to do that. It is easy to rally people around when you are fanning discontent but it is far tougher to turn that into loyalty. Leadership, whether of the loyalists or dissidents, is always fraught with the danger of unintended self-damage.
