Four weeks ago, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, basking in the light of Gujarat’s progress, remarked that “casteist” politics had arrested Bihar’s development. Nitish Kumar’s riposte was swift and brutal. The Bihar chief minister asked Modi to mind his own business and not give gratuitous advice to others.

That clash between two chief ministers, both members of the NDA, is interesting as Modi’s own party, the BJP, has shown that in Karnataka at least, caste considerations are more crucial, in order to survive in power, than performance.

The party has just now sacked its chief minister in the southern state, DV Sadananda Gowda, because it is afraid that the largest caste group in Karnataka, the Lingayats, will ditch it. That fear has made the BJP kowtow to its scam-tainted former chief minister, BS Yeddyurappa, who has forced the party’s central leadership to agree to his demand that it sack chief minister Sadananda Gowda, a Vokkaliga, the second most dominant caste group in the state.

When Yeddyurappa, the Lingayat face of the party, was ousted by the party leadership last August in response to the number of corruption cases faced by him, and in the light of the resultant erosion in the image of the party in Kanataka, the outgoing chief minister insisted that Sadananda Gowda, his then loyalist, be made his successor. The high command favoured Jagdish Shettar, another Lingayat, but Yeddyurappa did not want a parallel Lingayat centre of power and opposed his candidature. The central leadership gave in to Yeddyurappa.

Within a few months, Gowda, who was expected to be Yeddyurappa’s yes man, began flaunting independence. He gave a scam-free government. As he grew in confidence, he transferred Yeddyurappa’s backers in the bureaucracy to insignificant positions and began resisting Yeddyurappa’s demands on him.

A furious Yeddyurappa suspected that Gowda, a Vokkaliga from Dakshina Kannada, had made common cause with fellow Vokkaligas, Deve Gowda and his son HD Kumaraswamy of the Janata Dal (S). Fuelling his suspicions, the father-son duo began praising Sadananda Gowda’s governance of the state.

Yeddyurappa launched a campaign to oust Sadananda Gowda, dropping broad hints that he might break away from the BJP and launch a regional party. That pressure has now resulted in Sadananda Gowda being asked to quit by the party high command, a bare 11 months into his job.

Why has the BJP leadership been so accommodative to Yeddyurappa? Simple, Yeddyurappa has the unstinted support of Lingayats, who comprise 17 percent of the state’s six crore population and can decide the electoral fate in 95 of the 224 assembly constituencies in Karnataka. It is the near total support of the Lingayats which brought the BJP to power, and the party central leadership feared that it would be wiped out in the state in the next election due in May 2013, if the Lingayats were miffed because of Yeddyurappa’s marginalisation. The party leadership’s plea, that Yeddyurappa had to clear his name in the various scams that he is charged with, has not cut ice with the Lingayats, who feel that the BJP leadership is out to marginalise him.

Strangely enough, the Lingayats, now considered a major caste, was not supposed to be one. The grouping was born out of a rebellion against Brahminism by the 12th century social reformer, Basava, who constructed an intellectual platform – Anubhava Mantapa at Koodala Sangama – in current Bijapur district of Karnataka and brought together people from all religions under a non-caste umbrella. Brahmins, Vaisyas as well as other touchable and untouchable communities were initiated into the new creed that swore by Shiva and was non-discriminatory. Basava was soon killed for his defiance of the despotism of the king, Bijjala. With Basava’s death, the intellectual platform collapsed and the new creed faced a crisis. It, however, survived, although it has now morphed into a caste with five different sub-castes. With Brahmins in a minority, the middle castes are the power wielders in the state.

Thanks to their numerical preponderance, the Lingayats controlled the politics in Karnataka’s earlier avatar, the Mysore state, along with the Vokkaligas. It provided six chief ministers, including Yeddyurappa.

The iconic Devaraj Urs, arguably the best chief minister Karnataka ever had, broke the power of the Lingayats and Vokkaligas in the early 1970s, building a rainbow coalition of the backwards, minorities and SCs and STs.

For close to 11 years, the Lingayats were political wilderness. But with the Janata Party seizing power in 1983, the Lingayats and Vokkaligas shared power again. As long as Ramakrishna Hegde was alive, he enabled the Lingyats to have their share of power, keeping them within the Janata Party fold. But with the Congress returning to power in 1989, the Lingayats lost power yet again. The Congress, with its belief in the rainbow coalition that Devaraj Urs had forged, marginalised the Lingayats. With Deve Gowda becoming the critical factor in Karnataka politics in the 90s, the Lingayats were completely marginalised.

That is when the community, outcast in Congress, and distrustful of the Gowda-dominated JD(S) decided to cast its lot with the BJP. Slowly, constituencies in north Karnataka, which were once the bastions of the Congress, fell to the BJP, stunning the Congress. The Congress has tried since then, unsuccessfully, to regain its Lingayat base.

Such has been the political ghettoisation of castes, that now the BJP is identified with Lingayats. The Vokkaligas, who form 15 percent of the state’s population, have slowly mobilised around the JD(S).

The Congress, worried at losing the support of the two most populous castes in the state, has been trying to woo the Lingayats, with Sonia Gandhi visiting a prominent Lingayat seer, Shivakumara Swami of Suttur mutt, last month. It is even toying with making a Lingayat the chief of its state unit, but the other caste groupings within the party have prevented that from happening.

Sonia’s visit and the possibility of the Congress luring Lingayats scared the BJP central leadership to no end. It probably had nightmarish visions of Yeddyurappa leading the Lingayat flock out of the party. If that happened, party managers, calculated that the BJP would be reduced to 20 or 30 seats in the next assembly elections due in May 2013.

Having resisted Yeddyurappa’s pressure so far, it began weakening. Yeddyurappa tightened the screws further by praising Sonia Gandhi as a leader who stood by her supporters. The inference was obvious. He was threatening to move towards the Congress camp. For the BJP, that scenario would be a nightmare. It hastily agreed to mollify the former chief minister.

So blatant has been the caste-wise division in Karnataka, that the BJP which accuses others, notably Mulayam and Mayawati, and lately Nitish, of playing caste politics, is not above indulging in blatant caste politics itself. As for Congress, it would do the same, but has lost out in the game. And the JD(S) makes no bones about its Vokkaliga strength.

Modi, so quick to attack non-BJP governments and parties, has been strikingly silent at the caste war raging in his party in Karnataka. Perhaps, Nitish and co. should draw his attention to it.