Every Indian kid playing cricket on the gullies and maidans of India learns this home-truth very early: When your team wins the toss, always always always, choose to bat first. At the maidan, gully or apartment complex level, the team that bats first gets to tire the opposition out. Or, run away after a batsman accidentally breaks a window-pane. Or, create a scuffle and not bowl after batting first. Cricket may seek to be a fair sport at the highest levels. But gully cricket, like life or politics, is not fair.
In October 2007, this reference to gully cricket was on most lips in Bangalore and Karnataka. The sport being discussed, though, was being played was on another field. Somebody was being conned of his turn to bat. Or, as was the case here, his chance on the throne.
Twenty months earlier, Bookanakere Siddalingappa Yeddyurappa as head of Karnataka’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unit had joined hands with H D Kumaraswamy of the Janata Dal (Secular) to forge a coalition government in the state. As per the equation struck by both parties, the JD-S’s Kumaraswamy would be the chief minister of Karnataka for the first twenty months, while B S Yeddyurappa the deputy CM for that time. After that, power would change hands. In cricketing lingo, Kumaraswamy would bat first and Yeddyurappa a year and eight months later. But is politics that simple?
In early October 2007 Yeddyurappa’s time at the helm approached. The CM-in-waiting was readying to get to Raj Bhavan on the appointed day, hoping to scale his political summit. But the JD-S refused to budge from ceding the CM’s chair. For not the first time in his political life, Yeddyurappa had been sold a dummy. His countenance, observers say, bore the fury of a boy who had bowled and fielded all day, only to be snatched of his turn to bat. BJP party workers raved and barked and abused the Gowdas of the JD-S (and later withdrew support). By now, as is his wont, Yeddyurappa’s slit-like eyes began doing their job. What commenced as rage alchemized to grief. It was the first of what would be many famous instances, when Yeddyurappa would weep in public. Karnataka’s crying (future) CM was born. By the next week, Yeddyurappa had already made his way inside the heads and sketches of the cartoonists of the Kannada press. Thus was also baptized, perhaps contemporary India’s most comic CM.
In the following three years, as chief minister with a full majority, Yeddyurappa has gone from strength to strength – in providing laughter. However, he is different from other Indian politicians known for their entertainment quotient. A Lalu Yadav of Bihar may appear a baboon to the English-speaking intelligentsia. But the truth is he’s a shrewd dude. An E K Nayanar may have formed a great friendship with Mulayam Singh in the 1980s when they met in Delhi. Both were against the usage of English in the functioning of state and central governments. According to both, Indians had to communicate in their native languages. So when Nayanar went back to Kerala, he wrote to Mulayam in Malayalam, and Mulayam replied in Hindi!
However, Yeddyurappa is of another class. He is a total natural. The more agitated he becomes the funnier he gets.
Yeddyurappa has thrown a chair at his rival inside the state BJP and former minister in the Vajpayee government Ananth Kumar for allegedly fomenting divisions in the state unit. He has put his command over street Kannada to stentorian effect in public against the backers of the Reddy brothers of the mining lobby. For various reasons, he has considered weeping to be a public expression more than a private one. Indeed, B G Gujjarappa, a well-known Bangalore-based political cartoonist often finds a furnace beneath the face of the chief minister. “Have you ever seen him smile? He’s always grumpy and angry and agitated. Plus we know that he’s highly religious. So in one of my cartoons I depicted him as the grumpy saint Durvasa Muni,” he says. Yeddyurappa has once threatened to take religiosity to another plane. One of his gurus had even advised him to do suryanamaskarams naked in the mornings. This was for divine intervention to solve his unending political problems.
But it took L K Advani at a national BJP meeting at Palace Grounds in Bangalore in December 2009, to educate Yeddyurappa on the poetic purpose of tears. “You have to wipe the tears off the faces of the people,” a paternalistic Advani (himself a decent public crier) remonstrated. Since the counsel came from another man of tears, an obedient Yeddyurappa concurred. “From now on,” he said to the crowd, “I will not cry in public anymore … I will wipe the tears off the faces of the people of Karnataka,” he declared. And then he thundered: “I will develop the state like anything.” The crowd cheered. Unable to handle the accolades that came his way, he wept again. This time out of joy.
Yeddyurappa is an effortlessly lachrymose personage. He cries more often than toddlers. Indeed, he weeps so often that tears from his eyes could solve Bangalore’s water problems. Time as Karnataka CM might have primed him for future roles as a patriarch in Kannada serials – without glycerin. Over the last year or so, he can stake the claim of being the single-most harassed chief minister in an Indian state which enjoys full majority in the legislature. Hell, a lame-duck coalition may have been a cakewalk for Yeddy. Such is his kismet, that either Governor H R Bharadwaj, or the BJP national headquarters-backed faction within the state unit, or the Reddy brothers or the involvement of his own children in cornering Bangalore Development Authority plots or all these factors put together have trapped the CM on different occasions, sometimes all at once. On silent days at the Vidhana Soudha, he has perpetuated excitement out of his own accord and inspired a fourth estate otherwise deprived of spice for its news pages. What a remarkable man.
For example, when the Indian cricket team won the World Cup Yeddyurappa announced Bangalore Development Authority plots for the players. It didn’t help that none of the members of the Indian team were from Karnataka or that the Chief Minister doesn’t have the authority to assign BDA plots. Indeed, the next day a viewer sent a joke to a Kannada TV channel saying that Yeddyurappa had been misquoted. What Yeddyurappa actually meant was if India won the World Cup in 2015 in Australia and New Zealand, he would announce land plots for players Down Under!
Yeddyurappa loves cricket. But again, he’s landed from another planet. When called to give away man-of-the-match awards in cricket matches what do most dignitaries and ministers do? They wait for boring commentators like Shastri or Gavaskar to announce their names and call the player of the match. The minister then gives the cheque and shakes hands with the player. Not Yeddyurappa.
After the India-England World Cup encounter at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, Nasser Hussain was the post-match presenter. Yeddyurappa would hand the man-of-the-match award. Hussain declared England captain Andrew Strauss for his superb hundred as the player of the match. When Strauss went to collect his cheque, a bespectacled Yeddyurappa wearing an avuncular half-sweater (in the middle of summer), did not handshake with Strauss. He gave him a big high-five! No wonder, Strauss couldn’t make much sense while speaking to Hussain afterwards.
Yeddyurappa’s love for the gentleman’s game was again evident last month. He was with one of his favorite colleagues in the BJP (state Power Minister, Shoba Karandlaje) to inaugurate a scheme for children at a municipal school near Mysore. It’s just that he spotted a bat and ball on the ground. The deprived batsman in Yeddyurappa took over. Karandlaje bowled. Yeddyurappa batted. (The timing was sweet.) The photos of him batting and her bowling lit up the next day’s papers. No two photographs have spoken a thousand words so well.
Most Bangaloreans slip into old age while negotiating traffic in the city. But the one image accompanying them till the pension office is the Karnataka CM. He’s on hoardings with a victory sign, he’s illuminating the lampposts with a toothy smile, and he’s on the back of every Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) bus.
The posterior of almost all BMTC buses have advertisements carrying his welfare schemes. These are usually of two kinds. One is the ‘Bhagyalakshmi’ scheme which Yeddyurappa started for the upliftment of the girl child. The second one is a fillip for women involved in farming. Both merit meditation.
In the Bhagyalakshmi ad, Yeddyurappa is donning the grand-father’s role. He is surrounded by girl children and carrying two of them on both his shoulders. The latter are listless, and even the CM appears as if he has been caught in a moment of suppressed shock. (Maybe one of the babies has wetted itself?). The second image is soporific stuff. It has Yeddyurappa standing like Robin Hood, along with the picture of a bull and a woman ploughing land.
Both pictures have one common trait: Yeddyurappa prefers clothes that are the color of idlis. His trademark white shirt and trousers make in the photos render a curious composition. In both ads the color of his clothes matches with that of his moustache and hair. But in the second image even the color of the white bull matches with that of Yeddyurappa's clothes and hair.
For a person who conducted the first separate agriculture budget by an Indian CM, Yeddyurappa's identification with his voting constituency is complete.
[A en edited version of this article appeared in www.firstpost.com]
