Karnataka battle lines: many Hindutvas bump up against layers of caste

In the caste game, moreover, the Congress is also an active player in Karnataka, and not, as in many states in the north, a spent force, giving the BJP a free pass. It has a strong local leadership and a pan-state leader in Siddaramaiah, its past governments are associated with popular welfare schemes like the Indira canteens, and it has held on to a social coalition, Ahinda (OBCs-SCs-Muslims), that it can call its own.

Bengaluru: Karnataka Congress President DK Shivakumar with senior party leader Siddaramaiah during a press conference to release the party’s manifesto for the upcoming Karnataka Assembly elections, in Bengaluru, Tuesday, May 2, 2023. (PTI Photo)

That is probably why in this election, amid speculation about Hindutva’s efficacy in the southern state, the Congress has raised the demand for a caste census. And while trying to shake off the “pro-Muslim party” tag the BJP tries to saddle it with, its manifesto talks about Hindu militancy.

In the coastal belt, however, where Hindutva’s story began in Karnataka and where it is still going strong, the BJP remains the dominant player. Here, the more it changes, the more it remains the same.

Yashpal Suvarna is one of the BJP’s 73 “new” candidates. Meet him in his home-office in Udupi, dominated by a large painting of an animated Modi addressing a docile audience, and you can pick holes in the BJP’s newness claim. Suvarna is a first-timer in the assembly arena, but in the Sangh Parivar, he is no newbie.

Yashpal Suvarna is one of the BJP’s new candidates. (Twitter/@YashpalBJP)

A Sangh full-timer, district office-bearer in the VHP-Bajrang Dal, active in the BJP since 2004, he is All-India National General Secretary of its OBC morcha. He is better known as a prime accused in the 2005 case of the stripping and parading of a father and son who were allegedly transporting calves — he was later acquitted by a special trial court.

He was also vice-president of the Development Committee of Udupi Government PU Girls’ College, where the hijab controversy blew up in December 2021 — Suvarna had then described the Muslim women students who went to court against the hijab ban as “anti-national” and “members of a terrorist organisation”.

Now, ahead of the election, he speaks of the “responsibility of each and every Hindu” to “safeguard Hindu samaj” and “protect nationalism”, by putting a “full stop” to cow slaughter, “love jihad” and “matantara (conversion)”. “You (Muslims) can avail of all the facilities, but you should not be against our nationalism”, he says.

Candidate Suvarna represents a hard saffron. The BJP’s poll-eve decision to do away with the 4 per cent Muslim quota, and redistribute it among Lingayats and Vokkaligas, belongs to the same category — the Congress has promised to bring back the quota if it wins. “300 medical seats, 1,600 engineering seats, 3,000 government jobs” — in Hubli, AM Hindasgiri, former minister in two Congress governments, spells out what the BJP proposes to take away from the state’s minority community.

But step away from the coast and there are softer shades of saffron in Karnataka, a distance yet to be covered between Hindu and Hindutva, and a push-back from more defined caste identities.

In fact, even in Udupi on the coast, it is possible to hear a different saffron tone, especially among women, particularly among the young.

In Byndoor town, Pragathi Ganesh Shetty, a doctor, says firmly: “Being a student, being a Hindu, being BJP, I say that they (Muslim students) have a right to wear the hijab”. And in Mangalore’s St Aloysius College, Aakanksha, 18 and a first-time voter, says Modi has “done things that have brought positive change, like in sanitation”, but his party is wrong on the hijab. “They (Muslim students) feel safe in it, that’s what matters”, she says.

Away from the coastal belt, on the campus of GSSS Institute of Engineering and Technology for Women in Mysore, a group of students disagree with each other on their political preference, but agree that the ban on hijab is unjust. She supports Modi at the Centre, Akshata says, but “burqa might have been a problem, not the hijab”.

Voices such as Akshata’s could be speaking for a younger generation of women coming of voting age. But they also draw upon the longer and larger resources of syncretism on the ground in Karnataka.

Hindutva’s hardness on the coast owes to a special set of circumstances, says Muzaffar Assadi, dean at the faculty of Arts, Mysore University, which do not extend beyond it. In the coastal belt, “economic competition and communal polarisation went together” — the contest for economic opportunities between Hindus and Muslims amid a linking of the local economy with international markets, especially the Middle East, gave impetus to mobilisations by the Sangh Parivar.

These mobilisations also drew fuel from the greater visibility of Muslims here in public spaces. In Mangalore, Prof Valerian Roderigues points out: “In other parts of Karnataka, Muslims are marginalised, live in poverty. Here, they are more visible in trades and occupations, media and education. They have powerful networks and associations. Their greater visibility, especially of Muslim girls, challenges the homogeneous social space the RSS wants to create”.

Outside the coastal belt, however, the Hindutva project finds the ground less hospitable. “No memories of Partition that are transmitted across generations, our experience of it is mostly textual. Second, no ruler who can be constantly castigated, no Aurangzeb-like figure”, says Assadi. The narratives about Tipu Sultan that abound in South Karnataka, for instance, are also highly contested.

In the state’s other regions, instead, there are memories and legacies of a culture more syncretic. In north Karnataka, the Lingayat movement began as a revolt against the inequalities of Brahmanical Hinduism in the 12th century. Much has changed, the Lingayats are now seen as a BJP votebank, but the shift of the community to the BJP after their alienation from the Congress and the collapse of the Janata Party in the late ’90s was political, driven by the demand for representation, not because they were groomed in the Sangh Parivar.

South Karnataka saw the liberal princely ruler and an inclusive state. In the early 20th century, Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar brought caste to the centre, by implementing a reservation policy to break Brahmin domination in public services and provide representation to other castes, setting in motion the creation of caste elites that are now over a hundred years old.

Across the state, except the coastal region, therefore, Hindutva’s unifying vision bumps against diverse local cultures primarily shaped by caste, organised around local deities and powerful mathas. The mathas own land, run hostels, educational institutions and hospitals.

In village Bettadatunge on the edge of Mysore, at the ancestral home of Devaraj Urs, the Congress chief minister who constituted the Havanur commission for OBC reservation, and spearheaded land reforms in the ’70s, long before the 1990s’ Mandal revolution upended caste equations in the country’s north, his great grandson talks of the salience of caste over Hindutva in Karnataka. “North India thinks one way, South India thinks another way”, says Srinath Raj Urs.

Srinath is a leading light of the Urs association in his village, which acts as a support structure — giving scholarships and short-term loans for marriage and hospitalisation, helping young men in the community in getting jobs by activating networks that reach inside private sector offices and government corridors, easing their journeys from the village to Bangalore.

Of course, the Urs association is only one of the many caste associations. “Election to the Vokkaliga Sangha is conducted like an MLA election”, says Srinath’s cousin, Aruna.

Ahead of this election, then, amid the heat and dust, a distinctively Karnataka question for the BJP — how much, and in what manner, can it count on the politics of Hindutva to help it to flatten the ground and broaden its appeal in the state, as opposed to merely energising its core base? And for the Congress, in Hindutva’s more bumpy southern ride, an opportunity it can miss or seize.