Yediyurappa with an ‘i’

IT is tough to type BS Yediyurappa’s name because the spelling changes like the whims of the legislators who make and unmake governments in Karnataka. The four-time Chief Minister has changed the spelling of his name thrice. He exemplifies all that is wrong with numerology and our democracy. The 21-day dirty nataka in Karnataka ended with Yediyurappa getting sworn in as Chief Minister of the state on Friday without the national leaders of his party or the Opposition in attendance. Well, Yediyurappa, the quintessential power politician, may not bother much about the moral legitimacy of an elected government, which only the Opposition can offer. Even his leaders — the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and the acting party president — kept away, probably being unsure about the outcome of Monday’s trust vote.

After all, Yediyurappa had failed in two earlier attempts in 2007 and 2018. In the first instance, he was CM for seven days and in 2018 he lasted just two days. The numbers game has been going on for some time, in fact, from the time the HD Kumaraswamy government took over in 2018. After fighting the polls against each other and splitting the anti-BJP votes, the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) came together simply to keep the single largest party BJP — with 105 seats — out of power. Rahul Gandhi claimed this as an act of political sacrifice for the sake of ideology. But it was sheer opportunism for Kumaraswamy, who was allowed to become CM with just 37 MLAs by the Congress, which has 78.

The Secular tag in parenthesis didn’t mean much for the JD (Secular) when it earlier teamed up with the BJP in 2006 with Kumaraswamy as CM and Yediyurappa as his deputy. Like its Information Technology czars, Karnataka politicians, too, are trailblazers, who conceived and launched Operation Kamala to cynically bypass the anti-defection law in pursuit of power shorn of all ideological humbug. The man who perfected this new magic of mustering a majority in 2008 ruled Karnataka for three years. Now, he has bounced back, what if he had to spend 23 days in jail and two years in the wilderness fighting his own party.