Karnataka minister who waded into Tipu Sultan row BJP’s key Vokkaliga face

The move to make the urbane Ashwathnarayan a deputy CM was widely seen as an the BJP’s attempt to position him as a major leader of the dominant Vokkaliga community since the party lacked a local leader with the credentials to deal with the rough-and-tough politics of the Vokkaliga heartland in south Karnataka.

It was also viewed as an attempt to challenge the almost monopolistic sway that former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda and the JD(S) held over politics in the Vokkaliga heartland districts.

Breaking the JD(S) hold in south Karnataka is seen as the key to the BJP winning Karnataka on its own strength rather than scrambling numbers by poaching legislators.

The attempt to project Ashwathnarayan — who is linked to a group in the state BJP that is allied with the former RSS functionary and current BJP national general secretary (organisation) B L Santhosh — as the Vokkaliga face was done at the cost of former deputy CM R Ashoka, a Vokkaliga leader considered to be close to Yediyurappa and the JD(S) leadership.

The MLA from Bengaluru — he is currently the minister for higher education, and information technology and biotechnology in the Basavaraj Bommai-led government — was also put in charge of the Ramanagara district on the outskirts of the city that is the political domain of JD(S) leader H D Kumaraswamy and state Congress chief D K Shivakumar. It was a clear sign that he was going to challenge their hold on the Vokkaligas.

While the experiment with appointing Ashwathnarayan deputy CM to nurture the Vokkaliga constituency did not last long — the BJP did away with the post of deputy CMs in July 2021, when Yediyurappa was replaced by current CM Bommai — Ashwathnarayan has continued his efforts to position himself as a Vokkaliga leader in the BJP with Hindutva credentials.

Given the Malleswaram MLA’s lack of experience in rustic affairs and his urbane disposition, the efforts to cast him as a strong leader adept at the confrontational politics of the Vokkaliga heartland has not taken off for the BJP and has even fallen flat on occasions.

Ashwathnarayan courted controversy recently by calling for “finishing off” former CM Siddaramaiah of the Congress on the lines of the British finishing off the 18th-century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan (claimed in some recent right-wing narratives as a killing by Vokkaliga chieftains).

Although Ashwathnarayan later claimed that he did not mean to say that Siddaramiah, a leader of the Other Backward Class (OBC) Kuruba community, should be killed but rather finished politically, his statement was seen as part of his effort to emerge as a hardline Hindutva leader among Vokkaligas.

Since he was first appointed deputy CM in 2019, Ashwathnarayan has dared to take on top Vokkaliga leaders from the JD(S) and the Congress in a break from the previous practice among Vokkaliga leaders in the BJP of kowtowing to leaders such as Kumaraswamy and Shivakumar for the sake of their own long-term political survival.

During his tenure as deputy CM, Ashwathnarayan accused Kumaraswamy of tapping the phones of Nirmalananda Swami of the Adichunchungiri Mutt, who is the main seer of the Vokkaliga community, during Kumaraswamy’s tenure as CM.

In 2021, Ashwathnarayan almost came to blows with D K Shivakumar’s brother D K Suresh, a Congress MP, on the dais at a public event in Ramanagara after he accused the brothers of doing little for the region.

Following the murder of a BJP worker in the communally polarised Dakshina Kannada region in July 2022, the minister suggested that the BJP government was ready to carry out extra-judicial killings against people attacking right-wing activists.

“Such people will be made to shiver in a way that they will never dream of carrying out such murders. The time for encounters has come. Our government will take strong action and will not allow such crimes to take place,” the higher education minister said.

Ashwathnarayan’s efforts to emerge as a leader of the Vokkaligas has had its consequences for him within the BJP and outside in the last five years.

In the party, Bommai has had to intervene on a few occasions to prevent Ashwathnarayan from hogging all the limelight for events such as the installation of a 108-feet statue of Vokkaliga icon Kempegowda at Bengaluru airport last year. Siddaramaiah has accused Ashwathnarayan of being party to a scam in the recruitment of 545 police sub-inspectors in the state. Several candidates linked to the minister’s region were selected to be PSIs and later arrested for gaining selection through cheating and fraud in the recruitment exam held in 2021.

D K Shivakumar has alleged that Ashwathnarayan leaked documents against the state CM in connection with a Bitcoin scandal in 2020. Kumaraswamy has accused the minister of being involved in a scam in the appointment of officials to a private education trust that runs key institutions in Bengaluru.

While the BJP minister’s stature as a politician has not grown significantly since he became a deputy CM n 2019, his credentials for networking and business have increased substantially with a production house, Hombale Films, linked to his family producing money spinners such as KGF 2 (Rs 1000 crore plus revenue) and Kantara (Rs 300 crore plus revenues).  Kantara has received praise from the likes of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, and Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal.

The recent call by Ashwathnarayan to “finish off” Siddaramaiah is widely seen as his posturing as a strong leader of the Vokkaligas who are generally distrustful of Siddaramaiah since he quit the JD(S) in 2006 to join the Congress. Whether the move will pay political dividends or backfire is to be seen.

Incidentally, one of the factors that cost the Congress party the 2018 elections is widely believed to be the dismissive remarks Siddaramaiah made about Deve Gowda and Kumaraswamy. Ahead of the polls, Siddaramaiah had sworn that Kumaraswamy and Deve Gowda would not come to power. This is believed to have consolidated Vokkaliga votes in favour of the JD(S). This led to a three-way battle in the elections and resulted in a hung Assembly. After the polls, the Congress and the JD(S) formed a coalition for a year and the BJP returned to power in 2019 by poaching 17 MLAs from the two parties.