With the swearing in of Kumaraswamy as the Chief Minister of Karnataka on May 23, 2018, the curtains have come down on the eight day drama that unfolded in the State following the declaration of election results of the Karnataka State Assembly polls on May 15. The BJP became the single largest party, winning 104 seats, but was 7 seats short of the half way mark. Meanwhile, erstwhile rivals Congress and JD(S), who won 78 and 37 seats respectively, quickly stitched together an alliance and staked claim to form the government in the State. 

However, late in the evening on May 16, Governor Vajubhai Vala, an old RSS man, multiple term minister in the Gujarat State government and a close aide of Narendra Modi during the 13 years he was Chief Minister of Gujarat before he was nominated Governor of Karnataka in 2014, chose to invite the BJP legislature party leader B.S. Yeddyurappa to form the government in the State and gave him a huge 15 days to prove his majority. The Congress-JDS combine rushed to the Supreme Court for an urgent hearing, challenging the Governor’s order. In an unprecedented pre-dawn hearing that began at 2.11 am and ended at 5.28 am, the Supreme Court refused to stay the swearing-in of Yeddyurappa as the Chief Minister, but asked the Attorney General to place before it the papers on the basis of which the Governor had taken his decision at the next hearing on May 18. Hours later,  in the morning of May 17, Yeddyurappa was sworn in as Chief Minister of Karnataka by the Governor. With the BJP having been given 15 days to stitch together a majority, the Congress-JDS in what has become routine today for Indian democracy quickly bussed out their MLAs to the Telengana capital of Hyderabad to prevent the BJP from reaching out to them and getting them to defect. Simultaneously, the Congress released a series of audio recordings, where BJP leaders (including B.S. Yeddyurappa himself) were heard talking to Congress MLAs, promising them Cabinet berths and huge amounts of cash for switching sides. 

Resuming the hearing on the Congress-JDS petition on the morning of May 18, the three judge Supreme Court bench reduced the 15-day window given by the Governor to Yeddyurappa to prove his majority, and ordered a floor test in the Karnataka Assemby at 4 pm on May 19, turning down pleas made by Yeddyurappa’s counsel for more time. This decision effectively sealed the fate of Yeddyurappa, as the time given by the Supreme Court was too less for the BJP to successfully indulge in horse-trading. After 56 hours as Chief Minister, he resigned from his post even before the trust motion was moved in the Assembly.

An analysis of the Karnataka election results reveals that while the Congress got nearly 2% more votes than the BJP (Congress got 38% votes, BJP 36.2%), the BJP was more successful in translating its votes into seats, managing to get 26 more seats than the Congress. The JDS-Congress alliance together has 56.4% of the votes (JDS got 18.4% votes). But the biggest winner of the 2018 Karnataka Assembly elections is clearly the BJP – it increased its vote share by 16% as compared to its tally of 19.9% votes that it got in the 2013 Assembly elections. The Congress too increased its vote share by 1.4% over its 2013 number. The JDS suffered a slight decline in its vote share – it had got 20.2% of the votes in 2013. 

This clearly reveals that fascist forces have made deep inroads into the southern state of Karnataka. The BJP-RSS formula of launching hate campaigns against the minorities and raising false emotive issues like the issue of Jinnah’s portrait in AMU and thereby polarising the electorate to consolidate the so-called ‘Hindu’ vote is succeeding even in the south. 

Pushed to the wall by the BJP juggernaut which is threatening to marginalise all the opposition parties in the country, the top leaders of nearly all the prominent opposition parties came down to Bengaluru for the swearing in of the JD(S)-Congress coalition government headed by H.D. Kumaraswamy on May 23. Among those who attended were  Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, NCP chief Sharad Pawar, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, SP president Akhilesh Yadav, BSP supremo Mayawati, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, LJD leader Sharad Yadav, as well as the Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee and her Andhra Pradesh counterpart Chandrababu Naidu. Clearly, the ground is being set for an anti-BJP coalition for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. 

The opposition needs to thank Governor Vajubhai Vala for creating the conditions which led to this huge show of opposition unity. His decision to invite Yeddyurappa to become the Chief Minister and giving him 15 days to prove his majority – enough time to get at least 7 MLAs to defect – clearly proved once again to the opposition the ruthlessness of the BJP in its quest for absolute power, steamrolling all opposition. The Congress-JDS coalition is also likely to be more stable; the threat posed by the BJP and its RSS pracharak Governor will force both to be more accomodative in the inevitable tussle between them over distribution of Cabinet berths. 

If the growing offensive of the fascist forces on the democratic and secular fabric of the country is to be checked, then a unity of the opposition is a must. Only a united opposition can defeat the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. That the BJP can be defeated was proven by the defeat of the BJP candidates in recent byelections held in UP and Rajasthan. Had the Congress and JDS entered into a pre-poll alliance in Karnataka, they would have swept the polls, winning at least 150 of the 222 seats. The same scenario would have prevailed in the 2017 Assembly elections in UP, where the 39%  vote share of BJP would have been no match for the combined vote share of Bahujan Samaj Party, Samajwadi Party and Congress at over 50%.

But the problem is, even if the opposition unites and wins the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, it will not be enough to check the gradual growth of the RSS-led fascist forces in the country. The RSS is probably the world’s largest cadre-based organisation. On the other hand, the united opposition is only a rag-tag coalition, that will have only come together due to the threat posed by the BJP. Its commitment to democracy and secularism is very weak, as is proven by so many past instances. Neither does it have an alternate pro-people economic programme. In fact, it is the policies of globalisation, privatisation and liberalisation implemented by the previous UPA Government—which led to rising inflation, worsening unemployment, a huge agrarian crisis, and a massive increase in poverty and destitution—that created the conditions for the BJP to sweep to power in 2014. 

Therefore, if indeed the opposition unites and does win the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, there is no guarantee that it will not implement policies that blatantly favour big corporate houses as in the past. There is no guarantee that it will take steps to hugely increase access to free / affordable and good quality education and health care and safe drinking for the ordinary people, that it will provide a decent pension to the elderly, that it will implement policies that will lead to the creation of a large number of secure and regular jobs with a decent pay, that it will take steps to revive Indian agriculture and bring it out of the crisis which has pushed more than 3 lakh farmers to commit suicide in the past two decades, that it will take steps to reverse the policies of privatisation being implemented in the country for the past three decades. And in case it does not implement these pro-people policies, once again, in the next elections, the BJP will take advantage to come back to power, and meanwhile the RSS will have further increased its strength. 

Given this situation, it is important for the socialist parties and socialist activists within this opposition alliance to unite and press the united opposition to accept a minimum alternative pro-people programme. This alternate programme can be the genuine implementation of the economic programme as outlined in the Directive Principles of the Indian Constitution. The Directive Principles direct the State to:

• strive to build a social order in which justice, social, economic and political, shall inform all the institutions of the national life.
• strive to minimise the inequalities in income, and ensure that there is no concentration of wealth in the country;
• ensure that the ownership and control of the country’s resources should be such that they benefit the common good, implying that they should not be used for private enrichment.
• make effective provision for securing the right to work, for securing just and humane conditions of work, ensure equal pay for equal work for both men and women, and ensure that people get a decent wage that enables them to have a decent standard of life and full enjoyment of leisure and social and cultural opportunities. 
• regard improvement of public healthcare facilities and raising the level of nutrition of the people as among its primary duties. 
• make effective provision for securing the right to education; endeavour to provide early childhood care and education for all children until they complete the age of six years. 
• endeavour to eliminate inequalities in status, facilities and opportunities amongst people.

Even though the Directive Principles are not enforceable by law, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar made it very clear in a speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 19, 1948 that the Assembly desires that in future, both the legislature and the executive must make these principles “the basis of all executive and legislative action . . . taken hereafter in the matter of the governance of the country.” He went on to explicitly state that the Assembly desires that future governments must strive in the fulfillment of these Directive Principles “even under hard and unpropitious circumstances”. This means that the Constitution makers were of the opinion that while at the time of independence, due to the immense poverty of the country, it was not possible to make the economic and social rights embedded in Part IV of the Constitution justiciable, as development proceeds and wealth generation takes place, these rights must be guaranteed. 

Seventy years later, so much wealth creation has taken place in the country. Therefore, all believers in socialist ideology and principles must come together and demand of the united opposition that the time has come to implement the economic programme contained in the Directive Principles, that the economic rights mentioned in the Directive Principles be considered as fundamental rights and they be guaranteed.