New Delhi, May 25: “Erwin Jaitley” is an unfamiliar name in national politics. It is unlikely to sit comfortably on the shoulders of the BJP’s chief strategist in Karnataka as he quietly hears party president Rajnath Singh praise him. In Bangalore, the BJP’s chief minister-in-waiting B.S. Yeddyurappa, too, said the party owes its victory to him in large measure.

Arun Jaitley is not quite the imaginary Erwin Jaitley. Despite the similar ring in the first names, the BJP spokesperson and Erwin Rommel, the German “Desert Fox” of World War II, have little in common. But in defeating the Congress in its stronghold, the man who has just crafted the BJP’s first southern comfort has taken a lesson from Rommel’s notes compiled in the treatise on desert battles, The Tank in Attack.

Sample this in the context of the Congress’s humiliation: “What difference does it make if you have two tanks to my one, when you spread them out and let me smash them in detail.”

In Karnataka today, Arun Jaitley wrote a script that his party played out, picking the Congress’s weaknesses, setting them up as targets and going for the kill with a focus that Rommel determined for his Afrikakorps as they spun wheels around the commonwealth forces in North Africa.

Jaitley has repeated a success he found in Madhya Pradesh in 2003 with Uma Bharti, with Narendra Modi in Gujarat in 2002 and in 2007 and with Nitish Kumar in Bihar in 2005. Although the Congress has fared better in Karnataka than it did in 2004, Jaitley’s tactics woven into the Yeddyurappa-led campaign ensured that the party — and Jaitley pointed this out this afternoon — has come up trumps in the state where the BJP was a non-entity 15 years ago.

Figures do not quite tell the tale. The Congress has got more seats (80) than its 65 (in 2004). But the impact of the Karnataka election goes beyond its arithmetic.

“Karnataka is an important way-station on the way to the Lok Sabha elections,” Jaitley told a television channel even as the seats were being counted.

With Karnataka today, Arun Jaitley has re-emphasised his position as the BJP’s election troubleshooter. The Congress has lost 12 Assembly elections since 2004. Jaitley has marshalled the victories for the BJP in four large states since the UPA came to power in New Delhi.

For a politician who has not personally contested a mass-level election since he was the leader of the Delhi University Students Union, that is quite an achievement.

Another parallel with Rommel: the German general came into armoured warfare from the outside — he was an infantryman — schooled himself in Panzer divisions, and learnt and evolved new manoeuvres before he went on to become a field marshal.

Perhaps it is the distance that Jaitley brings into his job — and the rigours of a different discipline like law — that affords him the space to assess like the outsider-looking-in.

Without a shade of doubt, he was the man in charge in Bangalore. As in Gujarat and Bihar before that, he rarely left the state capital.

He rented a house in the tony Koramangla locality, took his cook from Delhi with him -- he is on a strict diet since his bypass surgery -- drove from the house to the BJP’s central election office in Malleswararam and back like a diligent executive would between work and home.

He packed his office with infotech-savvy youth, ensuring that his database on Karnataka was as comprehensive as he could make it -- all of this without being able to speak Kannada. He made sure that that nothing, absolutely nothing, from BJP headquarters in New Delhi to the state passed without his knowledge. Unlike the Congress which deployed a platoon of leaders from Delhi to Bangalore, Jaitley was the BJP’s only central executive in Karnataka.

Jaitley chose his battles with care. (“Don’t fight a battle if you don’t get anything by it” -- Rommel). He knew that if the Congress’s hope -- that Yeddyurappa and Ananth Kumar would bicker -- came alive, the BJP would be left with little.

His first decision was to project Yeddyurappa as chief minister while the Congress dilly-dallied over S.M. Krishna. Jaitley also decided not to open a new front in the Vokkaliga-Lingayat divide, chose good Vokkaliga candidates and split its vote (about 15 per cent) while retaining the Lingayat (17 per cent).

Similarly, he took away the Siddhayaramaiah factor and with it the Kurubas (another backward community) with their nine per cent vote. The last time this vote was with the JD(S). Had this vote gone to the Congress this time, Sonia Gandhi’s party may have been a mile ahead. (Rommel again? “In a man-to-man fight, the winner is he who has one more round in his magazine”).

“For the BJP,” Jaitley explained, “the challenge after the great betrayal (the JD(S)’s withdrawal of support) was to re-establish itself”. After designing its first victory in the south, Jaitley is set to rank among the party’s generals. So long as Rommel’s last lesson is unlearnt: the field marshal was accused of plotting against his Fuhrer.