Opinion The work of worship: Karnataka’s new state
Janaki Nair writes: Worship clearly has its uses in the state, if only as a smokescreen for government helplessness on matters of governance
Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Karnataka CM Basavaraj Bommai and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi during 115th birth anniversary celebration of seer Shivakumara Swami, in Tumakuru. (PTI) Emblazoned on the entablature of Karnataka’s Legislature Building, also called Vidhana Soudha, are the words “Government’s Work is God’s Work”. Chief Minister Kengal Hanumanthaiah, who conceived the then extravagant building, was not destined to occupy that office after the edifice was built. Not only was he censured for the extravagance, but the scales were tipped, after state reunification in 1956, in favour of the now dominant Lingayat community, with S Nijalingappa at the helm. Nijalingappa, in turn, may have found in those words a resonance with Basavanna’s famous vachana on “kayakave kailasa” (about the body as the abode of worship), which is commonly understood as an exhortation to find piety in labour.
The BJP government has aggressively pursued an inversion of the adage in its governance. For the last three years, beleaguered citizens have been accosted at the crossroads, on bus shelters, and been blitzed via newspapers and most other media with every conceivable form of “God’s work is Government’s work”. The Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Bill, 2020, was passed entirely without debate, but there was no missing an important first: Ministers K Eshwarappa, Prabhu Chauhan and others ceremoniously worshipped two bovines within the legislature building. Likewise, public works have now become new opportunities for worship – essentially of the MLA, but incidentally of an assortment of Hindu gods and goddesses. MLA Raghu and his supporters do not let even a small 50-foot stretch of road be repaved without announcing on massive billboards either the Bhoomi puja for that work, or celebrating its completion, sometimes years later, with another puja. No divinity seems to protect Bengaluru’s long-suffering citizens who endure dislocated vertebrae, delays, and death from the unending misery of potholed roads.
The work of worship has thus become a serious preoccupation of the Karnataka government in action. In 2021, Muzrai Minister Shashikala Jolle announced that Balipadyami – the annual return of the good king Bali who was vanquished by Vishnu – would be celebrated in all government-run temples as gau puja. In the past week, the Chief Minister himself endorsed and endowed the cow-worship programme with advertisements in all the major Kannada newspapers. It is as if Karnataka is twitching with the purpose of making up for more than a century of social peace, free of “cow protection” disturbances.
Since the race in Karnataka has of late been to both mimic and surpass Uttar Pradesh’s record on all registers, the Maha Kumbha Mela of the south at the Triveni Sangam – the confluence of the Cauvery-Hemavathi-Lakshmana tirtha in Mandya District – came as a fresh opportunity. It is a part of the “invention of tradition” to which the Karnataka BJP is wedded. Now scheduled to be held every three years, the Kumbh Mela may well eclipse the memory of the “green revolution” that was experienced in 1930s Mandya, when the waters of the Krishnarajasagara dam vastly transformed the landscape and the economy. To this day, bullock carts and tractors in Mandya are adorned with images of sugarcane and M Visvesvaraya, twinning the architect with that cash crop “revolution”.
Fostering worship in these extended and deepened forms is both an assertion of privilege and a statement of government priority. But it is Amrit Kaal for Hindus alone. Let us not forget another first pioneered by the state in 2021, the Karnataka Religious Structures (Protection) Act, passed to “save” religious structures in public places, against a 2009 Supreme Court Order. Meanwhile, as Karnataka witnesses this explosion of government-induced piety, the right to worship of other communities has been curtailed, disrupted, or simply ended. Not just the attacks on Christian prayer halls, and the bogeys of “conversion” that led to one of India’s most draconian anti-conversion laws. The violent opposition to morning azaan, and against namaz in public places are signs of the new privilege. An accidental touch by a young boy of a “holy” stick in Kolar’s Bhutamma temple led to his family being fined Rs 60,000. The family of a two-year-old who, untutored in the delirious irrationality of caste prohibitions, ran into a temple at Koppal, was fined Rs 25,000. The Dalits of Yadgir have had to enter temples with police protection. But state intervention is weak and reluctant.
The new government priority is declared in the police “protection” provided to the long, slow processions for Ganesh idol visarjan, which threaded their way through Muslim dominated areas, holding up traffic on nights when Bengaluru experienced torrential rains. The new priority equally declares itself in the High Court ban on political rallies and processions in March this year, ostensibly to ease traffic flows.
Karnataka’s Amrit Kaal has, meanwhile, breached the sacrosanct citadels of bourgeois privilege — the gated community. For long, the rich had retreated behind the secure and secular walls that assured them of what the rest of the city sorely lacked — planning itself. In a recent high-decibel radio advertisement selling this dream space to the gullible, the promised facilities included, not just gyms, walking tracks, 24-hour water, electricity and security – all staples of the past — but “temples”.
The joyless worship that suffuses Karnataka’s public life today is in sharp contrast to the festivities that surround the arrival of the goddess Durga and her family in Kolkata in autumn. Thoughtful, creative and socially sensitive art combined with the moment of worship make for a mass spectacle in which millions partake. No doubt, the visual space is cluttered, not just with mind-numbing advertisements, but repetitive imaging of the Chief Minister. Still, the viewing public is able to isolate the visual pleasures of each distinctive puja pandal, participate in playful conversations with the goddess, and stand in awe of the laborious piety that produced these artistic sites of worship. Karnataka, on the other hand, as it prepares to worship Kannada Bhuvaneswari on November 1, will be commemorating a language that has already been beaten by Hindi, imposed from above and below. Worship clearly has its uses, if only as a smokescreen for government helplessness on matters of governance.
Janaki Nair taught history at JNU
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