It was sometime late on Sunday that contact was first established between New Delhi and Malleswaram. This neighbourhood in the north-western part of Bengaluru is where the Janata Dal (Secular) patriarch, HD Deve Gowda, lives. The Congress had reached out to him because by then, a day after voting on May 12, it had figured out that it was not going to return to power in Karnataka.
The exit polls were a divided house, a few suggesting a Congress victory or at least emerging as the single largest party, while some others pointed to a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) surge. Siddaramaiah had asked the party cadre to sleep peacefully over the weekend, assuring them that the Congress is coming back. But perhaps more aware to what had happened inside the privacy of the polling booth, the Congress High Command had decided to step in.
