Nandan Nilekani vs Ananth Kumar: Bangalore could define the national mood, and winners

With Nandan Nilekani, a self described ‘ordinary man who went on to do extraordinary things’ pitted against the ultimate insider Ananth Kumar, and someone ‘extraordinarily ordinary’ certain to be drawn from the ranks of the ‘mango people’ to stand against both men, the battle for Bangalore South just got verrry interesting!

Will it be a three way contest that benefits no one single party? Will Ananth Kumar, who participates in every insignificant protest these days, and has eaten humble pie over rival B.S. Yeddyurappa but could fail to sew up the Lingayat vote or the pro-Nilekani Brahmin vote, survive? Will this be the fractured verdict, that may yet come to define parliamentary polls in 2014? Or will it be the one standout Congress success, in a sea of saffron? Nilekani, not just MP, Bangalore South, but the apolitical Manmohan Singh of a possible UPA 3…

Who knows! Except, with AAP threatening Congress in their little island of influence in UP, Chikmagalur could get klieg light treatment.

It’s where Gandhi scion, Rahul, after all, is rumoured to be wanting to replicate his formidable grandmother’s electoral success from this safe seat, after she lost the family fiefdom Rae Bareli a year earlier in 1977, to the sartorially challenged giant killer Raj Narain; he, of the green head scarf and the devastating punch lines. That’s the year that Indian politics as we knew it, changed irrevocably.

Just as it could, once again this year, where the gathering momentum of the Narendra Modi brigade – with Yeddyurappa clinging to his coat-tails, promising the gift of 20 Karnataka seats– could either swamp everyone and everybody in its path with an emphatic victory, or fall just short; and Modi, despite the admiration of the corporates and the energy of the pracharaks, finds he has nobody other than Jayalalithaa and her 39 seats, to prop up his electoral numbers.

Will Jaya be enough, is the question, if India tilts however infinitesimally, towards the aam aadmi, gifts it at least 30 seats and limits Modi to 120 seats, or less? Or will she want it all?

It isn’t just the Congress, who wants to stop Modi at all costs, but Rajnath Singh, the BJP’s default prime ministerial back up, rumoured closet anti-Modiist in the BJP, who will be smiling then, cashing in on his own ‘acceptability’ card.

There’s little question that the emphatic BJP victories in assembly polls in all four states in the Hindi heartland, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh and Delhi, will be replicated to some extent in the coming parliamentary joust.

In some measure in UP too, where the Muzaffarnagar massacre of Muslims, when juxtaposed against the unspeakably obscene display of wealth by the chief minister and his family at Saifai, has put paid to papa Mulayam Singh Yadav’s prime ministerial ambition.

His Muslim vote shifts to fatten Mayawati’s not inconsiderable Dalit support. So, another 50 seats for the BJP? Again, will it be enough?

For other allies like Nitish Kumar, who turned away from the BJP at the mere mention of the Gujarat strongman, there cannot be another U-turn. Where will Modi get the 40 seats that were once the BJP’s for the asking?

Mamata and her Trinamul’s reliance on a Muslim vote bank, as the Left dreams the impossible – a Third Front - makes for very slim pickings for the BJP in West Bengal. Ditto Kerala. Not so much Andhra, caught in the Telangana glare...

The Maharashtra pot is the most curious. It’s boiling. Can the BJP bank on a Shiv Sena, however divided pushing votes their way?

When someone like Maratha strongman Sharad Pawar says he’s not going to fight elections, the opposite has to be true. As in 1991, when he mounted his strongest campaign yet to be prime minister and fell foul of a covert campaign to push Nara­simha Rao’s name forward, Pawar may even be hoping he will be the acceptable consensus candidate.

Strategists in every political formation, big, small, insignificant therefore are totting up the numbers. Is it going south?

In Karnataka, the merger of the six seat ‘weak’ Karnataka Janata Paksha led by Yeddyurappa who brings his ten per cent share of the Lingayat vote to the mother party, helps the BJP consolidate the upper caste Hindu vote in favour of Modi.

Particularly the four parliamentary seats in the Lingayat heartland of north Karnataka, where in the 2013 assembly polls, it lost a whopping 20 assembly seats of the 33 (of 50) that it had won in 2009, leaving them with just 13!

Not so much in the old Mysore region, where the Congress goes head to head with Deve Gowda’s Janata Dala (S) determined to wrest back Mandya.

Despite the unspoken internal rivalry on the coast, the underlying support for the Congress could hold it in good stead as opposed to the BJP’s marked communal tag dragging it down.

BSY, with roots in the countryside, has his own gameplan. He may not stick his neck out for Ananth Kumar in the city, but he will for Modi. And if Modi makes it, BSY will buy a ticket for Delhi, let his younger son take his seat.

If Modi doesn’t, BSY wants to be the leader of the opposition in the state. And he doesn’t care either way, whether its Sadananda Gowda, or Gowda community leader wannabee R Ashok, who gets Bangalore North.

Either way, it’s the sitting MP from Bangalore South, Ananth Kumar who is spooked.Across rapidly urbanizing Karnataka, where the social media is frenzied, not just active, and here, in the IT capital, where three sitting BJP MPs must tap into public ire against the Congress or get swept away by the coming Aam Aadmi Party wave, the power of the young to change things is not to be sneezed at.

Political novice or no, perceptive Nilekani was the first to project the power of the young in his book Imagining India: the Idea of a Renewed Nation.

And Bengaluru is a young city, no longer home to just retirees who came to warm their feet at the fire. It is energetic, busting at the seams, and aspires to be a world class destination, that delivers on all parameters. The pressure on Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to give us a power cut-garbage-pothole free city stems from this.

(Well done, on the partial reworking of the Yelahanka-Devanahalli-Bellary highway, Siddaramaiah, but what are trucks, laden with goats being taken to slaughter and concrete blocks and motorbikes doing on the fast lane on such a smooth stretch!!)

The young ‘vote for change’.

They will not be denied. Inspired by AAP or not, it’s an idea whose time has come.