Analysts call it the JDS' final fight for survival. Just before the Lok Sabha polls, the party headed by its patriarch and former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda announced that they would join hands with the BJP and fight the upcoming parliamentary polls. Though many political insiders did not see this as a surprise, but for those within the JDS, it was a jolt just like the results of the Karnataka assembly polls where the party was reduced to only 19 seats out of the total 224, its lowest since 1999.
According to Sandeep Shastri, the JDS thought it would be better to pitch a tent with the BJP than the Congress because the party had had already broken ice with the saffron party earlier and had a better alliance with them than the Grand Old Party, which the JDS had tied up with twice — in 2006 and in 2018.
"If you look closely, the BJP-JDS alliance went off more smoothly rather than the Congress-JDS alliance. In the BJP-JDS alliance, it was the BJP that had a problem with the JDS and not the other way round. Now having gone into a partnership with the BJP, it is important for the JDS to be equally shrill, if not shriller than the BJP in attacking the Congress, especially when they have a fewer number (of seats) than the BJP in the assembly," Shastri explained