BJP’s Karnataka disaster wasn’t just about corruption, it was also about state’s failure to stand up to Islamist terror

The Karnataka Assembly results must have shocked even those who had been seeing the writing on the wall for some time now. It is this very vote-bank that almost left the BJP in Uttarakhand, but came back to the fold when newly chosen Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami made amends to the blunders of his predecessors — one of them being the decision to repeal of the Char Dham Devasthanam Board Act, which had brought over 50 temples, including Char Dham shrines of Gangotri, Yamunotri, Badrinath and Kedarnath, under state control. One can say, for the argument’s sake, that the Congress governments in the state had been equally, if not more, corrupt — then why this special treatment for the BJP? The murder of 32-year-old BJP youth-wing worker Praveen Nettaru in the coastal district of Dakshina Kannada in July last year, for instance, sparked widespread outrage; it saw mass resignations by party workers and also the vehicle of state unit president Nalin Kumar Kateel was targeted. There are many instances of callous indifference — from the story of Meenakshamma, the mother of a BJP leader killed by PFI terrorists in 2015, who, as per a story by The Print in 2022, “collects plastic trash to eke out a living, lives in penury and is the sole caretaker of her grandson”, to Yashoda, whose son Prashanth Poojary was again hacked to death by PFI men in 2015, surviving on the “rent she receives from their flower shop — where her son was killed — and a widow pension of Rs 600”.