The exit of Siddaramaiah from the post of Karnataka Chief Minister into what could be a political sunset has a major echo with what happened with Janata Dal (U) leader Nitish Kumar, not just in exit routes prescribed but in the fact that their exits also signal the death of a particular political lexicon of socialist politics.
Both former Chief Ministers began political life as part of the big socialist rise during the anti-Emergency movement, and both got their first electoral victories from the socialist frame — Nitish Kumar as MLA on a Janata Party ticket from Harnaut in Bihar in 1985, Siddaramaiah also as MLA as the Lok Dal candidate from Chamundeshwari in 1983.
For many years, the two leaders belonging to non-dominant backward castes — Nitish Kumar belonging to the Kurmi community and Siddaramaiah being a Kuruba — laboured under the umbrella socialist parties led by Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar and H.D. Deve Gowda in Karnataka.
Both refashioned the Mandal maths of OBC consolidation in their respective States. In 1994, Nitish Kumar held a Kurmi sammelan and formed the Samata Party, carving out the non-Yadav OBC “Luv-Kush” vote bank. He was also the first to identify Pasmanda Muslims as a distinct voter category. Siddarmaiah broke free from the JD(S)'s Vokkaliga-coded politics and the Gowda family to fashion the AHINDA comprising of Alpasankhyataru (Minorities), Hindulidavaru (Backward Classes) and Dalitaru (Dalits).
National parties
They found space for this refashioning in alliance with or within a national party. The Janata Dal (U) is one of the oldest allies of the BJP (with some diversions along the way), and Siddarmaiah joined the Congress after he was expelled from the JD(S) by former Prime Minister Deve Gowda in 2005 for going ahead with AHINDA conventions, which the latter felt threatened by.
Both leaders carried not just the weight of their caste coalitions but also the socialist strain of ideology on a retreat since its high noon in 1977. The growth of the BJP, on the right of the political spectrum, was at the expense of the socialist strain more than of the Congress.
BJP’s rise
With the arrival of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the national scene in 2014, the BJP too got creative with the caste coalitions that it drew up, especially in Uttar Pradesh and other north Indian States. Bihar and Karnataka, however, remained immune from any re-engineering by the BJP, but the exit of Nitish Kumar in Bihar and Siddarmaiah has split the politics of their States wide open.
The Janata Dal (S), allying with the BJP, has little chance of recovering the minority vote it lost to Siddarmaiah, and is largely seen as a Vokkaliga party, and will have to battle it out with the Congress for that vote too. In Bihar, the BJP got its first-ever Chief Minister with Nitish Kumar’s exit, with little chance of the Luv-Kush vote bank going away from the NDA in any intact way.
What the historic arc of both Nitish Kumar's and Siddaramaiah’s careers shows, however, is the current decline of the socialist strain in the Indian political firmament. For it to revive, a new lexicon by a new set of leaders will have to be fashioned as the post-Emergency generation of socialist leaders have taken their final bows from the dais.
