Prime Minister Narendra Modi subtly yet successfully played the Lingayat card with his public display of warmth and affection for BS Yediyurappa, the tallest political figure from the dominant Lingayat community, during his visit to Karnataka on Monday.

That Modi chose to launch the modern Shivamogga airport on Yediyurappa’s 80^th birthday only gave an additional touch of political importance to the event.

The warm relationship between the two leaders is not new. When Yediyurappa formed the first full-fledged BJP government in Karnataka in 2008, he got Modi, the Gujarat CM back then, to conduct a session for new ministers at Mysuru. Six years later, it was on Modi’s request that Yediyurappa rejoined the BJP and merged his political outfit KJP with the saffron party.

Modi heaping praise on Lingayat political figures, including those from the Congress, may help the BJP arrest possible drift by sections of Lingayats away from the ruling party, say analysts. The PM’s gestures possibly comforted sections of the community members who may not have liked the way Yediyurappa was made to step aside in July 2021.

At a rally in Ballari, last week, home minister Amit Shah urged people to vote for Modi and Yediyurappa while seeking another term for the BJP. The party seems to think Yediyurappa can woo his community’s voters. In fact, the Shivamogga show was so much around and about the veteran BJP leader that Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee‘s (KPCC) communications chief Priyank Kharge wondered why the PM did not take chief minister Basavaraj Bommai’s name even once.

The PM sought to rub salt on the Congress wounds later in Belagavi by saying the grand old party ill-treated Karnataka’s political figures, S Nijalingappa and M Veerendra Patil, both former CMs. The two leaders were Lingayats and it was meant to be understood.

It was with this aim to prevent any sense of hurt in the community that the ruling party chose to replace Yediyurappa with Bommai, another Lingayat leader. It is often said by analysts that sections of Lingayats felt deeply hurt by the way the Congress party removed Patil as CM in 1990. It is another matter that the Congress did come to power years later.The JD-S has not been able to mend fences with Lingayats after its leader HD Kumaraswamy refused to pass on the CM’s mantle to Yediyurappa in 2007 as per an agreement between the two coalition partners. In the elections that followed in 2008, Yediyurappa led the BJP to power.

Bommai has moved to include Panchamasalis, the largest subsect of Lingayats, under the 2D category of OBC quota, but they are demanding reservations under the 2A quota. Sections of BJP leaders are worried how they will react in the election.

The Opposition Congress has its own pockets of influence in the Lingayat-dominated regions as the data shows.

The Congress always gave a tough fight to the BJP. It, in fact, fared better than the BJP in the 2018 assembly election by polling 38% of votes, slightly ahead of the BJP’s 36.22%. Five years earlier, the Congress had got 36.59% of votes, pushing the BJP to the third place. In the 2018 assembly polls, too, the tight contest led to the BJP falling short of a majority in the assembly.