A senior bureaucrat from the Karnataka cadre had remarked to me in jest: “Don’t underestimate us, we are the Bihar of the South." This was a reference to the state’s intricate caste politics.

If Siddaramaiah was able to save the day after his deputy D.K. Shivakumar ratcheted up tension claiming his ‘promised’ turn for the Chief Minister’s chair, it was largely because of his base among the minorities, backward classes, and Dalits broadly identified as the Ahinda spectrum. Over time Siddaramaiah has expanded and consolidated his hold over the OBC coalition by periodically playing the reservation card, disrupting the Vokkaliga-Lingayat axes that dominated the state’s politics for a long time.

It would be unfair to blame the Congress alone for exploiting caste arithmetic. Ever since Rajiv Gandhi alienated the Lingayat community by unceremoniously sacking Veerendra Patil in 1990, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had capitalised on the blunder to make inroads into that community, culminating in the long era of B.S. Yediyurappa. However, each time it tried to ease out Yediyurappa, it met with setbacks. Their attempt to replace him with another Lingayat leader, BS Bommai, proved ineffective and led to their defeat in 2023.

The BJP tried to neutralise Bommai’s unpopularity by aligning with H.D. Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (Secular), which has a strong Vokkaliga base. However, D.K. Shivakumar, a Vokkaliga himself, managed to weaken this alliance. Yet, when Shivakumar upped the ante within the Congress party, Siddaramaiah checkmated him — perhaps with some help from the Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, who is also a........

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