Union home minister Amit Shah’s vow on Sunday to scrap the reservation for Muslims in Telangana is being seen as the fallout of adverse ground reports from poll-bound Karnataka.
The BJP fears that any electoral setback in Karnataka could deal a blow to the party’s expansion plans not only in the neighbouring state but the entire southern India, party insiders said.
A section of the party leaders in Delhi said that Shah sought to keep the party in the reckoning in Telangana and shield its prospects from getting impacted by the electoral outcome in Karnataka next month. Telangana goes to the polls towards the end of this year.
In the middle of the election campaign in Karnataka, Shah took a break to address a rally in Telangana on Sunday, where he termed the 4 per cent reservation for backwards among the Muslims as “unconstitutional” and vowed to scrap it if the BJP came to power.
“We will put an end to Muslim reservation…. Quotas are the constitutional rights of Dalits, tribals and the backward classes and we are committed to ensuring that,” Shah said, launching an attack on the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) government, seeking to accuse it of appeasement politics.
In neighbouring Karnataka, the ruling BJP scrapped a similar 4 per cent reservation for backward Muslims. The party is banking heavily on the move, announced a month ahead of the May 10 polls, to undercut anti-incumbency and sway the voters by playing the polarisation card.
The Basavaraj Bommai government in Karnataka distributed the freed-up 4 per cent Muslim reservation equally among two politically dominant communities, the Lingayats and the Vokkaligas, hoping that the social engineering with communal overtones could act as a trump card in the polls. The decision, however, reached the Supreme Court which has observed that on the face of it, the move appeared to be on “highly shaky ground” and “flawed”.
A BJP MP from Karnataka said: “The (scrapping of the) Muslim reservation issue is playing a big role in the elections but it may not be enough to set aside voter anger over the performance of the state government.” The MP said that apart from the reservation, the party was banking heavily on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaigning to help the party retain the state.
The road ahead for the BJP in all of south India — Telangana in particular — is believed to be deeply linked with the party’s performance in Karnataka. For decades, the BJP has not been able to spread its wings beyond Karnataka in the south.
“The poll outcome in Karnataka will have an impact across the southern states. Since Telangana is the only other southern state where we have been working hard to expand with some success, the impact there will be the most,” a BJP general secretary said.
The BJP is a distant third in Telangana with just two MLAs in the Assembly but it has four Lok Sabha MPs. The BJP is going all out to replace the Congress as the main challenger to the ruling BRS in the state.
The BJP has been opposing the 4 per cent Muslim reservation in Telangana for a long time and it has gained fresh momentum as the K. Chandrasekhar Rao government proposes to increase it to 12 per cent.