Bangalore Crumbling Part 4

BANGALORE CRUMBLING, PART-4
Parents Dharam, Gowda can’t stand each other so the city is no one’s baby
Cong fears JD(S) will swallow support base, JD(S) leader Deve Gowda has perpetual fight with top brass; who has time for infrastructure?

The Indian Express


Why would a government allow the biggest brand name that India’s ever had to go to ruin?

Why does the Congress Chief Minister Dharam Singh let his coalition partner—former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (Secular)—pressure him into stopping some of India’s most innovative and successful urban renewal projects? Why does he leave out in the cold a battery of officers and CEOs who worked together to keep Bangalore in shape for the years ahead?

The answer to the studied disdain of Bangalore’s crumbling infrastructure and the periodic outbursts against its tech moghuls lies in the political report card of Gowda’s JD (S).

It contested 16 legislature seats from the city in the elections of April 2004.

The result: JD(S), 0; Vote share: 7 per cent (The Congress got 14 seats and the BJP, four). Bangalore snubbed Gowda.

To that rejection, add Gowda’s visceral dislike of former Chief Minister S M Krishna—and an unstated desire, reveal JD sources, to undo what he did—and the recipe for Bangalore’s downturn is complete.

The coalition is among India’s strangest: two traditional rivals, who ran a bitter election campaign against each other, suddenly find themselves running—or trying to run— a government together.


The dislike is mutual but Singh is forced to carry Gowda along to keep the BJP, which had 79 seats in the Karnataka Assembly, out of power. The Congress won 65 and the JD(S), 58.

Frustrated legislators of both parties admit that governance is taking a backseat to deal-making and seemingly-endless negotiation.

It couldn’t be happening at a worse time: Bangalore’s economy is booming, but future investments from the world’s biggest names are at risk because the city is on the verge of coming apart.

‘‘Bangalore is a microcosm of many worlds colliding, of the challenges facing India itself,’’ reasons the CEO of one of India’s biggest tech companies, requesting anonymity. ‘‘And it’s all happening in an accelerated time frame, in weeks instead of years. So with urban governance frozen since the elections, you can see how quickly the city is crumbling.’’

The disconnect between the two coalition partners is starkly evident in the Chief Minister’s failed attempts, over the last five months, to expand his Cabinet from 12 ministers to a possible 34.

‘‘One practical difficulty in running the government is that our partners were dead-set enemies of the Congress,’’ Dharam Singh tells The Indian Express. ‘‘Plus, after 1952, this is our first experiment with a coalition ... I have told Madam (Congress chief Sonia Gandhi), I will do my best.’’ÿ

Gowda readily admits his bitter relations with the Congress before the elections. ‘‘We are not pleased to be with them in the government either,” he says. “We were forced to do so to uphold the secular fabric of the country.’’

Within the alliance, there is deep resentment against Gowda.

‘‘He seems concerned only about what he can get for his community and the Old Mysore area (Gowda’s stronghold in southern Karnataka),’’ says an agitated former minister who isn’t getting a berth only because Gowda doesn’t want him to.

Indeed, the Cabinet expansion is now a joke primarily because Gowda is opposed to almost the entire senior Congress leadership in Karnataka.ÿThere is disquiet in the JD(S) as well, with Gowda trying to push his two sons to the helm of party affairs.

H D Revanna is the PWD minister—he jeered at Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani—and H D Kumaraswamy was anointed general secretary of the JD(S) last week.ÿ

‘‘He wants to bequeath control to his sons,’’ alleges a JD(S) insider. It won’t be easy: both sons are in their 40s—the same as Gowda’s bitter opponent, the Congress’s former Urban Development Minister S K Shiv Kumar, who’s been successsfully kept out of the Cabinet—but simply don’t have his influence.

Shiv Kumar humiliated Gowda in the general elections by putting up a novice, a former television reporter, against him in the Kanakapura parliamentary seat. Gowda suffered a humiliating loss, saving face only because he also contested another seat.

Shiv Kumar, too, is a Gowda, and this war of the Gowdas, say Congress legislators, augurs ill for their party. Bureaucratic appointments are being based on caste, and there is widespread disquiet over a faltering administration.

One Congress legislator says: ‘‘The longer the ministry lasts, the stronger Deve Gowda is becoming.’’

Many in the Congress fear that indulging Gowda could take their party to doom.

‘‘In UP, Rahul is trying to revive a decimated Congress,’’ says a frustrated Congress minister on condition of anonymity. ‘‘We predict the way things are going, a son of Rahul or Priyanka will one day face the same situation in Karnataka.’’

But you can’t tell India Inc to wait for that day.


One practical difficulty in running govt is that our partners were dead-set enemies of the Congress. After 1952, this is our first experiment with coalition...I have told Madam (Sonia), I will do my best.
—Dharam Singh, Chief Minister

We are not pleased to be with them (Congress) in the government either... We were forced to do so to uphold the secular fabric of the country.
—H D Deve Gowda, former Prime Minister & JD(S) supremo