His presence on a sofa in the Opposition lobby made them scurry back or rush for cover to the media room or the washroom abutting the Karnataka legislative assembly hall.
“Budhi kuthidaare, Budhi kuthidaare,” (Boss is sitting there) they would whisper to each other and go around to the treasury lobby to enter the assembly.
Budhi was how Karnataka’s longest-serving chief minister D Devaraj Urs (1972-1977 and 1978-80) was referred to.
This was a few days after the 1980 Lok Sabha election results that gave the Congress (I) or the Indira Congress 27 of the 28 seats with the lone seat going to the Janata Party. Urs resigned as CM after his party, the Congress (U), came a poor third.
As the results came in, 84 of Urs’ MLAs defected to the Congress (I) bolstering its strength from 41 to 127 at the behest of the powerful H C Srikantaiah to make R Gundu Rao the chief minister.
Once a protége of Urs, Gundu Rao had grown close to Sanjay Gandhi, the younger son of Indira Gandhi. Sanjay’s relationship with Urs was never good. A year after Urs stepped down, he called Sanjay “an upstart” in a private chat with this reporter.
Coming face-to-face with Budhi after defecting was too difficult for the MLAs. Urs had handpicked most of them from socially and economically backward backgrounds and given them party tickets for the 1978 assembly elections. He even provided for their financial well-being.
But Urs was not bitter about MLAs abandoning him. He had seen it all while holding small portfolios as a junior minister under chief minister S Nijalingappa.
Power alternated between the upper caste groups of Lingayats and Vokkaligas while the majority of the population belonged to the backward castes, the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Muslims and other minorities. (Urs belonged to a small backward caste).
Urs realised that the route to political growth was to innovate. In 1969, when the Syndicate in the Congress headed by Nijalingappa decided to push its agenda and the ‘Goongi Gudia’ aka Indira Gandhi revolted, the first one to join her was Urs because her slogan was Garibi Hatao.
The collapse of the Congress (O) government in the then Mysore State and the imposition of President’s Rule gave Urs enough time to build the party from scratch. The 1971 India-Pakistan war, the creation of Bangladesh and the popularity of Indira Gandhi helped Congress (I) come to power in the 1972 assembly elections with Urs as the chief minister.
For the first time, the majority of the population got fair representation in the assembly. He picked people from the grassroots, literally, like a trade union lawyer (Mallikarjuna Kharge), an Urdu teacher (late Dharam Singh), a lawyer (Veerappa Moily) to become MLAs.
That was just the first step towards change. He consolidated his hold by implementing two important policy decisions. One was to give land to the tiller through tribunals at the taluk level which resulted in the transfer of over 15 lakh acres of land to tillers.
The second was a reservation policy in educational institutions and government for backward castes. He focussed across all sectors. That’s how he laid the foundation for the establishment of the world’s largest software powerhouse called the Electronic City and, at one point, the largest conglomeration of small-scale industries at Peenya, among others.
His “haves vs have-nots” policies did not block the latter among the upper castes. He used the Emergency to stick to his agenda of social justice. Indictment by the Grover commission of inquiry, instituted by the Janata Party government at the Centre, into corruption charges made little impact.
His sincerity of purpose ensured the “downtrodden,” as he called them, voted for him even when the Janata houses his government built collapsed due to rains. A scheduled caste man in Chamarajanagar told this reporter then: “Urs gave us the courage to walk to the police station to complain against any atrocity. And he ordered the police to accept our complaint.”
That was the line to victory in the 1978 assembly elections for the Congress (I) that brought Urs to power for the second time on his own steam.
(The author is a senior journalist based in Bengaluru)