Nitin Gadkari’s ministry and the betrayal of Coastal Karnataka

 BJP MPs’ failure to prevail on the Union government deepens public anger

………..

Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road Transport, is fast becoming better known for his sermons on spirituality and the afterlife than for his work on India’s roads. That would have been harmless if he were not also the custodian of the country’s highways. But when the roads in vast stretches of India are breaking down, and especially when the highways of coastal Karnataka resemble craters rather than carriageways, Gadkari’s preference for talk over task looks like gross dereliction.

The stretch of National Highway 66 from Kochi to Panvel, running through Dakshina Kannada, Kasargod, Udupi, and Uttara Kannada, is today a civic disaster. Potholes, unfinished widening, broken dividers, and patchwork repairs have created a dangerous corridor where accidents are routine and economic losses are mounting. Just a couple of days ago, a home maker died on the stretch near Mangalore due to a pothole on the road.Tourists curse the drive, businesses bleed money, and ordinary commuters live in fear. Despite years of protests, demonstrations, and delegations, Gadkari’s ministry has turned both deaf and dumb. The people of the coast feel abandoned, as though New Delhi has simply written them off.

In this collapse, the role of local MPs deserves equal censure. Brijesh Chouta in Dakshina Kannada and Srinivasa Poojary in Udupi brag about their connection  with Gadkari, flaunting photographs of themselves with him, as though proximity to the minister is an achievement in itself. Week after week, they release images of their Delhi trips and their supposed “direct line” to Gadkari. But the people of their constituencies are beginning to ask: what has this friendship yielded? Where are the improved roads? Where is the safer highway? The answer is written in the dust and rubble of NH-66 — nowhere.

Citizens are no longer impressed by the charade. The questions being hurled at Chouta and Poojary are blunt: “Is this what we sent you to parliament for?” MPs who once claimed influence in Delhi now look exposed, gasping for breath in the face of their constituents’ anger. For the BJP, which has long projected coastal Karnataka as its ideological fortress, this is not just a local embarrassment. It is a political wound that could fester.

A pothole does not respect ideology. It mangles the spine of a motorcyclist without asking whether he votes saffron or red. A highway jammed with broken tarmac does not recognise whether a trader supports Modi or the Congress. It simply suffocates the economy. Gadkari’s sermons and the MPs’ photo-ops cannot plaster over this reality.

The Modi government often showcases Gadkari as the poster boy of its infrastructure push. Yet in coastal Karnataka, he has become the face of neglect and farce. The more Gadkari drifts into the role of a spiritual raconteur, the more the region sees him as indifferent to its suffering. And the more Chouta and Poojary cling to their photographs with him, the more they expose their own impotence.

The truth is stark: coastal Karnataka has been betrayed by both its minister and its MPs. Unless the Union government acts with urgency to repair its highways and its credibility, the ruling party risks finding that the real cracks are not in the road, but in its own political foundation.

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