There is a whole range of ideological fracas taking place in Karnataka. A lot of things appear to have come up at the same time for the Congress government. However, despite the seriousness of the issues being thrown up, and the heated vulgarity of some exchanges, the altercations have been somewhat weak and suspect. That is mostly because those playing the ideological game appear casual, noncommittal and at ease with old fluid lines.
What has formed a larger backdrop to ideological squabbles in recent days is the Dharmasthala temple issue. The temple’s caretakers have been accused of horrendous crimes over the years: Rapes, murders, mass burials, etc. Based on unreliable and unverified sources, the Congress government, in its enthusiasm to appear rational and righteous, constituted a special team to probe the startling accusations. A masked man, who sprung up from nowhere, was leading investigators through dark forests. It all eventually turned out to be an enactment of farce in the name of reason.
When the police team went on a wild chase looking for graves, and found none, what was meant to be an enquiry into criminal acts acquired shades of an ideological conspiracy to defame the temple. The digging of the graves had become such a televised spectacle that it made the failure to discover skeletons a spectacular dark plot. Now, political parties in the Opposition are going on noisy processions to apparently restore the sanctity of the temple.
What was primarily about the caretakers of the temple has now become about the temple itself. The absence of graves has become an ideological burden that the Congress government has come to needlessly carry. The government landed itself in trouble, or quite literally in the ditch, largely because it assumed it had to gratify its ideological drumbeaters.
When the Dharmasthala issue was being debated in the state assembly, in the spontaneity of a frivolous exchange, D K Shivakumar, the deputy chief minister, recited the opening lines from the anthem of the RSS, the ideological parent of the BJP. He had recited the anthem not to signal his affinity to the organisation, or shift of his loyalties, but to apparently demonstrate his understanding of the “ideological enemy”.
Shivakumar does not possess the necessary verbal felicity and nuance to either state his position clearly or defend it. He can best spin a coin or twist an arm but can never turn a phrase. Therefore, his own colleagues, who are in a new race inside Congress to score points of ideological fidelity, extracted an apology from him.
Even before the Shivakumar issue could taper off, Booker prize winner Banu Mushtaq was invited to inaugurate the Dasara festivities. This led to yet another ideological confrontation. The BJP objected to a Muslim woman being invited to a festival that involved Hindu rituals and temple visits. They asked her if her religion would permit idolatry, and if she would come sporting vermillion on her forehead to inaugurate the Dasara? Even as this sounded crude and exclusionary, they pulled out her past utterances where she had said that merging the Kannada identity with a goddess, Bhuvaneshwari (like Bharat Mata), and a flag that had vermillion and turmeric colours in it, had made her feel like an outsider to Kannada language and culture.
The Siddaramaiah government has defended its invitation to Banu Mushtaq by saying that Dasara is not a religious function but a festivity of a secular state. This further complicated matters. If it was simply a festivity of a secular state then why should there be any religious rituals, and why should it involve the celebration of goddess Chamundeshwari? This came up in the course of sophistic reasoning. Dasara is a 400-year-old tradition; but then that argument of tradition would not sit well with the militant constitutional frame that the Congress has tried to give itself in recent times.
The Congress party has not known this ideological rigour, but is of late being forced into one by Rahul Gandhi. The party is now expected to speak in binaries of right and wrong when such clarity does not actually exist among Congressmen. The grounds of grey between extremities that the party occupied seem to have dissolved. Gandhi has unequivocally defined the RSS as his ideological enemy.
Paradoxically, the moment an enemy is defined, one automatically begins to borrow from registers of hate — notwithstanding the argument that the enemy was named to establish a “mohabbat ki dukaan”. That is, to preserve love, amity and the social fabric. Placing Congress in such a rigid ideological frame has had its consequences. It has made it difficult for the party to convincingly engage with questions related to tradition, culture, gods or cultural nationalism.
For a party that appears deracinated, there is hardly any imagination in that direction or a serious investment to develop a central thesis. Therefore, its ideological rigidity smacks of a certain ad hocism. Also, secularism, which is essentially about accommodation of differences, does not lend itself to ideological rigidities.
Congress, caught in the throes of an imagined ideological game, has been unable to address the communal tensions in the state either. They have dismissed it by simply attributing these tensions to instigation of their opponents. They have not paid attention to the details of cultural contraptions that work over a period of time to create explosive societal milieus. It is easier to blame and invoke a stock ideological answer than painstakingly study cultural shifts.
For instance, the stone-pelting that was witnessed in Mandya district during Ganapati visarjan, on Sunday, has been predictably addressed with tired communal tropes, besides police action. The party’s inability to formulate a deeper response was also visible when a Hanuman flag was replaced by the tricolour in the same Mandya district, in January 2024. It had appeared like a classic case of reason replacing faith. It was also about dangerously testing allegiances.
The Congress fluidity of ideological approach, what seemed like its second nature, in the past is captured well by writer and lawyer, A G Noorani. He wrote that at “every juncture in its history the RSS, while nursing its progeny, sought to woo the Congress as well.” He says that Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 had upset the then RSS chief, Madhukar Deoras, because after the Janata experiment, there was little to differentiate the BJP from the Congress (I). “This impression had got strengthened as Mrs Gandhi made ‘Hindu noises’ and the BJP resorted to secular rhetoric,” he wrote.
Deoras was also against prosecuting Indira Gandhi for her excesses during Emergency. He preferred a “forget and forgive” policy. After her death, the RSS had felt that if Rajiv Gandhi’s hands were strengthened, Hindu interests would be served. Rajiv too adopted a policy of “cooperative politics” instead of “confrontational politics”. Interestingly, Rahul Gandhi has never put under the scanner the relationship of his grandmother and father with the RSS or their majoritarian opportunism. He has enjoyed a greater ideological compact with his great grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru. Therefore, all ideological posturing taking place inside the Congress now is perhaps to just please him.
Despite the growing sense of ideological rigidity in the Congress, one could argue that Karnataka is still a bed of compromises. The BJP recently expelled a senior legislator and a former Union minister, Basangouda Patil Yatnal, because he relentlessly spoke about the alleged cozy arrangement between the B S Yediyurappa family and Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. He demanded, and continues to demand an end to “adjustment politics” so that ideological fidelity is restored in his party, which by default would mean in the Congress as well.
Srinivasaraju is an author, most recently, of The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
