Ground report: In Karnataka’s IT constituency, a divide that’s showing now — social and political

His apartment complex on Sarjapur Road, home largely to IT professionals, is one of several in Mahadevapura, dubbed Bengaluru’s IT constituency. With 4.7 lakh voters, it is one of the largest constituencies in Karnataka. Mahadevapura, a reserved SC seat, was carved out only 10 years ago, when 110 villages were drawn into the margins of a city expanding on a diet of multinational capital. In both the 2008 and 2013 assembly elections, it voted BJP’s Aravind Limbavali to the assembly.

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Nayak, a Goud Saraswat Brahmin originally from Mangalore, is one of the few Kannadigas in Sun City Gloria. He runs a spoken Kannada-learning course on the Telegram app for outsiders to the city, but does not believe that a more strident politics around language, which surfaced in the run-up to these assembly elections, is relevant in Karnataka. “Most of the southern states are very self-enclosed. Only Karnataka is not. It is a place north India can occupy and include,” he says.

Sun City Gloria, he says, is a “mini-India”, though he admits it does not include members of the Scheduled Caste community. “There are a few Muslims. I don’t know their personal views but they mix with all of us,” he says. “Not all Muslims are terrorists,” he says generously. He also believes that most RWAs in the area are tilted towards the BJP, because “they believe in development” and the party’s national leadership.

“It doesn’t matter if this is a state election. If BJP wins here, which it will, it will be like chocolate on vanilla ice cream,” says Harish K, a scientist and a member of an RWA from Marathahalli, endorsing that view.

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Mahadevapura is a place of dizzying extremes — from flashy tech and business parks that hum with engineers and entrepreneurs, generating revenue that makes it one of Karnataka’s wealthiest constituencies, to slums that are still struggling for roads and drinking water. Drainage is the great leveller, with no sewage connections for either slums or gated communities.

“All the sewage finds its way into the lakes,” says Anjali Saini of the Whitefield Rising, a vocal citizens’ group. Bellandur, a lake that has often burst into flames and international headlines, falls in this constituency. The hundreds of housing complexes that have sprung up around the IT industry add up to close to 2 lakh votes. Another big segment is the vote of the Dalit community, also around 1.5 lakh. Only Aam Aadmi Party has fielded a Madiga Dalit, Bhaskar Prasad. The Congress’s A C Srinivas and the BJP’s Limbavali are Bovis, a community which is placed higher in the SC hierarchy.

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In Cauvery Nagar, a large slum surrounded by the high-rises of Mahadevapura, Nagaraj M watches in amusement as the campaign enters his lane. The AAP candidate has just walked through, distributing what looks like Rs 2,000 notes. They turn out to be leaflets asking for an end to money power in the elections, causing much hilarity among those conned.

“This is a Congress area but on the whole it is 50-50,” says Nagaraj M, a 28-year-old Dalit, dressed in a white shirt and jeans. A graduate in arts, he runs a chicken shop in the area. While campaigns in the city might be muted, he is fatigued of the barrage of propaganda on his phone. “I have stopped uploading pictures on Facebook. You get no likes. Everyone is busy with political messages,” he says laughing.

The eight wards in Mahadevapura is divided equally between Congress and BJP corporators. “The corporator here is a Congress man, and he has recently done some good work. So, we will vote for him,” he says. Newly laid roads in the colony and a functioning drinking water ATM has helped the party’s cause. “In areas where the BJP corporators have worked, the vote will go to the BJP. We vote on local issues. But in the apartment complexes, they are not bothered. They come from north India. They look at Modi and vote,” says Nagaraj M. “We will vote Modi too, but in the national election,” pipes in his friend Nagaraj S, 30, who is straddling a Royal Enfield. Very few young people from the slums end up getting jobs on “the other side”, he says, in the IT parks or the apartment complexes. “That is only for the outsiders,” says Nagaraj M.

But it is not as if the BJP has the middle-class vote in its pocket. There are loud murmurs of anti-incumbency against Limbavali, though he might be helped by a listless Congress campaign on the ground. “No technology has been used to better our lives in this tech hub,” says Saini. She reels off a list of works that have not been completed — from the absence of a single public toilet to a hi-tech bio-gas plant, set up with CSR money that Whitefield Rising raised, that never took off; from traffic gridlocks to the absence of sewage lines. “For a constituency that generates Rs 510 crore of revenue, we have been shortchanged. The BJP MLA says it is because of the Congress government in Karnataka. But I think it’s because they want to just to say, ‘Look what a mess Bengaluru is under Siddaramaiah’,” she says.