BS Yediyurappa’s career in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) often begs the question, why does he continue in a party which has tried to block his rise at every opportunity with men who don’t measure up to half his stature among the masses? If, through these attempts to cut him to size, the Sangh tried to prove that it is bigger than the individual, it has failed miserably. And how has Yediyurappa spent so many years in the party and political movement despite being largely indifferent to its core ideology, Hindutva?
For the man who designed ‘Operation Kamala’, life and the political scenario around him has changed little since 2004 when he joined Kumaraswamy to topple the Congress government led by Dharam Singh. The BJP is still struggling to get a firm grip on the state and Yediyurappa is still fighting to establish that he is the party’s most influential leader in Karnataka.
The predictions of the Karnataka Assembly exit polls are not looking good for the BJP. Even if we see a result that trumps the predictions and the BJP emerges as the single largest party, it will be up against a formidable opposition and the government will always be under threat. The Congress too could face the same situation if it attempts to form a government. HD Kumaraswamy of the Janata Dal (Secular) is expected to ultimately play kingmaker, again.
This is how a dozen chief ministers have come and gone in the last 20 years in Karnataka. It’s all becoming quite boring. Karnataka can’t possibly be a hung state forever. Necessity is bound to give birth to a circuit breaking political formula. This constant seesaw battle between the Congress and the BJP with the JD(S) in the middle can only logically end with the emergence of a fourth political force in the state.
There are many communities such as Dalits, Muslims, and Kurubas with the numerical strength to put their might behind one party and break this loop. But they neither have intergenerational wealth to create their own leaders nor the social capital to influence other communities to join them in a bid for power.
That leaves the Veerashaiva Lingayats as the only real force that can possibly disrupt this cycle. Indeed, these forces are already at play. The basic contradiction of Hindutva – caste – is proving to be its undoing. The community is mustering around the narrative that the BJP has preferred Brahmins over them in important party positions.
The question is, what role, if at all, will Yediyurappa – who belongs to the Veerashaiva Lingayat community – play in the coming years as these forces continue to gather. At what point will he make a break from the BJP? What are his options if he continues to stay?
At least in the past, all the resort-hopping and sweaty deal-making seemed worth it for Yediyurappa because he was the principal driver of post-poll negotiations on behalf of the party. He was shaping his own legacy along with that of his community. In the event of a hung Assembly this time, he will still be expected to bring all his networks and negotiating skills to the table by his bosses in the BJP. But he will be without veto power or major stakes in the final outcome.
It’s easy to imagine what the anti-corruption agencies will do to him and his sons if he were to break free of the BJP. But what has happened to Yediyurappa’s ambition? Opposition leaders across the country are fighting the BJP through elections and through litigations. If anything, they have sought to capitalise on the corruption, sedition, and defamation cases against them by building a narrative around political persecution. Besides, what can be worse for Yediyurappa than what he faced in 2011? He was forced to step down as Chief Minister and his colleagues watched silently as he went to jail.
There was a time when he was the undisputed face of all the 99 sub-castes that make up the Veerashaiva Lingayat community. Today, Yediyurappa is at best the most influential among many other leaders of the community who are exploring options outside the BJP. These leaders have emerged as a result of repeated disappointments with the BJP, which became the primary magnet for the Lingayats in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the Vokkaligas split the Janata Dal and formed the Janata Dal (Secular) under HD Deve Gowda.
The Vokkaligas have continued to rally behind the JD(S) and ensured that no political calculations can be made in Karnataka without taking the Gowda family into account. But the Veerashaiva Lingayats are once again in the hunt for a mascot with Yediyurappa stepping back under instruction from the party high command.
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No other leader from the community has yet emerged to unite the community like Yediyurappa did. In fact, reports suggest that many of those who have moved away from the BJP are angry with the way he has been treated and disappointed with him for not fighting back. If that’s true, could they reunite under Yediyurappa?
If, on the other hand, he decides to stay on in the BJP, we can be sure that his sons will not be allowed to inherit his political capital and Yediyurappa’s legacy will end with him.
This growing resentment is very different from the one that propelled Yediyurappa to start the Karnataka Janata Paksha (KJP) in 2012. Back then, it was just about his survival. It was a myopic experiment that had a short-shelf life. This time it is about the political future of the Veershaiva Lingayats as a whole.
Dark days were predicted for communal harmony in Karnataka when Yediyurappa became the Chief Minister of the state in 2007 and made the BJP relevant in south Indian politics for the first time.
Critics of the party’s Hindu nationalist politics expressed fears that Karnataka would become the next Gujarat. That might have well been the plan of the party high command and its ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). But one of the biggest roadblocks in the Hindutva project turned out to be the man who introduced the saffron party to power in the state.
In the last two decades during which Yediyurappa has been in, out, and around power, the BJP has been on an all-out Hindutva offensive at the national level under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his principle acolyte, Amit Shah. Yediyurappa, on the other hand, has been on a completely different path.
While Modi, Shah, the party, and its mass organisations have gone from strength to strength, Yediyurappa’s career graph has been marked by incredibly tall peaks and extremely deep valleys. He became CM thrice, went to jail once, threatened to break away from the BJP several times and left to form his own party on one occasion, a move that heavily damaged the saffron party and brought Congress’s Siddaramaiah to power.
In his years of trials, Yediyurappa has been described, even by his own colleagues, as corrupt, power hungry, nepotistic, and obsessed with creating his own political dynasty.
He has taken all these hits on the chin. Never in this time has he sought to cover his shortcomings by donning a cloak of strident nationalism or hardline Hindutva. He has never been accused of hate speech against minorities, which has been the preferred weapon for his party colleagues during a crisis. Yediyurappa’s response to criticism from the RSS and his rivals in the party has been to point to the enormous popularity he enjoys among a cross-section of the state’s voters, not just Lingayats.
The party tried to substitute him with three different leaders but all of them failed to make a mark. Sadananda Gowda has passed into insignificance, Jagadish Shettar is now in the Congress, and Basavaraj Bommai’s best days seem to be behind him.
Bommai, who enjoyed the longest stint of them all, often left the party embarrassed with his administrative ineptitude and tendency to be a man of too many words. Bommai’s attempts to switch to hardline Hindutva and provocative speeches failed to elevate him to the status of the more established hardliners such as CT Ravi, Ananth Kumar Hegde, Tejasvi Surya, and Pratap Simha who enjoy cult-hero status in their circles. He could neither prove his administrative mettle nor establish his Hindutva bonafides. Efforts to project him as a Lingayat leader failed to erode Yediyurappa’s status in the community.
Yediyurappa became the Chief Minister of Karnataka for the first time the year I started my journalism career as a probationary district correspondent in Dakshina Kannada which, along with the neighbouring district of Udupi, is considered to be the heartland of the Sangh Parivar in south India. He lost power in just seven days when the JD(S) withdrew from the coalition. My first impression of the saffron party in its homeland was that its activists were in an intense mood after Yediyurappa and the BJP’s unceremonious exit from power.
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The summer months leading to the 2008 Assembly elections were marred by a series of vigilante attacks on interfaith couples and Muslim cattle traders in different parts of coastal Karnataka. At the time, Yediyurappa was an unknown quantity in the state’s progressive circles and seen merely as the leader of a right-wing, Hindu nationalist party.
But reporting from the ground along the coast, I was hearing something else from hardcore Sangh ideologues. Most of them were older Brahmin men who had spent a lifetime in the RSS. For these men, Yediyurappa was not Hindutva enough.
On the surface, the mass organisations aligned with the BJP such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal, Hindu Jagarana Vedike, and Durga Vahini were running amok in the twin coastal districts of Udupi and Dakshina Kannada, unleashing violence and polarising the electorate ahead of the polls. These organisations were largely made up of activists belonging to intermediary castes such as Billavas, Mogaveeras, and Bunts. They seemed to be working with the single-minded aim of bringing the BJP back to power.
The Brahmins from the RSS were, however, sending out strange signals. It was as if they were part of the BJP’s 2008 bid and yet, distinctly apart.
There were loud and public assertions of Hindutva on one side and these subterranean murmurs about differences between Yediyurappa and the old guard of the RSS. The most talked about Yediyurappa detractor at the time was BL Santhosh, who was then the General Secretary (Organising) of the BJP. He’s today the party’s National General Secretary and many rungs higher in the party’s pecking order than Yediyurappa despite being no match for his mass appeal.
An Udupi Brahmin, hailing from the influential but extremely miniscule Shivalli sub-caste, Santosh was described as ‘Pure RSS’ by his sympathisers in the Sangh and by the media. When I sought to know what ‘Pure RSS’ meant, they would point to Sangh leaders such as N Yogish Bhat and MB Puranik from Mangaluru; VS Acharya and Vishveshwara Theertha, the pontiff of the Pejawara monastery, from Udupi; Prabhakar Bhat from Kalladka; U Ram Bhat from Puttur.
The admirers of the pure RSS men pointed to their sophisticated mannerisms and austere lifestyle. The conversations would invariably include references to the Pejawara seer’s simple monastic routine; Ram Bhat’s hut-like house in Puttur; Yogish Bhat’s faded and beaten down Toyota Qualis car. Apart from their visible austerity and alleged mild manners, all these men also happened to be Brahmins.
Yediyurappa belongs to a subset of the group of Lingayat castes called Banajiga who are hawkers and traders. There is some confusion over whether he is from one of the more prosperous Banajiga communities or from the Bale Banajiga caste, who are traditionally bangle makers and lower down the hierarchy. But there is no dispute over the fact that Banajigas as a whole are considered inferior to priestly Veerashaiva Lingayat communities such as the Aradhyas and Jangamas as well as other privileged caste groups such as the Panchamasalis.
Neither the privileged Veerashaiva Lingayats nor the marginalised among them feature in the top ranks of the RSS and BJP despite their demographic power. The leadership of the Sangh Parivar in Karnataka continues to be helmed by Brahmins who are a micro minority.
Among the admirers of ‘Pure RSS’ men, Yediyurappa was seen as a career politician polluted by money and power. The pure RSS men never spoke against Yediyurappa in the open, they were too sophisticated for that. But it was whispered that they were not happy with the wheeling-dealing of Operation Kamala and the influence of the Reddy brothers of Ballari on the BJP. In these off-record conversations, they often made it a point to mention that he was from a trading community, given to wheeling and dealing.
The first Brahmin to break the silence was Ram Bhat who put up a rival candidate against the BJP in Puttur during the 2008 elections as an open challenge to Yediyurappa. When we went to interview Bhat, his tiny house in Puttur was bursting with RSS volunteers who were campaigning against Yediyurappa’s BJP.
Bhat said that the RSS wanted to bring ‘Rama Rajya’ in Karnataka but Yediyurappa only wanted to be chief minister. Bhat accused Yediyurappa of being corrupt and running the election campaign with money from the Ballari mining mafia. This was at a time when even the opposition hadn’t caught on to the mining issue. The RSS leaders of the time chose to remain silent instead of countering Bhat.
The disapproval of the pure RSS men proved to be a minor distraction as Yediyurappa rode a popular wave and formed the first independent BJP government in south India. The murmurs and whispers, though, did not stop along the coast.
Yediyurappa had only taken charge when a major agitation started building against land acquisition for the Mangaluru Special Economic Zone (SEZ). While on the surface the agitation seemed to be led by farmers and environmental activists, the movement was said to enjoy the sympathies of the pure RSS men. Many of them had worked in the Western Ghats conservation sector and believed that coastal Karnataka was a pristine, holy land created by the Brahmin sage Parashurama.
Yediyurappa was trying to project himself as a modernist and an industry friendly CM and hosting Global Investors’ Meets (GIM) at the time. In one of the GIMs, he went as far as to shed his trademark safari suit for Italian style business formals and asked his cabinet colleagues to do the same.
All this was received quite cynically by the pure RSS men who saw him as a representative of rapacious capitalists. It was the time I discovered that there was a group of pure RSS men who were anti-capitalist and romanticised artisanal village life. The SEZ project was finally scrapped when many of the pure RSS men openly joined the agitation led by the Pejawara seer who threatened to go on an indefinite fast if the land wasn’t denotified.
Less than four months after Yediyurappa took power, on September 14, 2008, cadres of the Bajrang Dal and the VHP launched a series of attacks on churches in the coast. Mahendra Kumar, an OBC who was then the Bajrang Dal chief, and MB Puranik, a Brahmin who was the VHP chief, addressed a press conference a few days later claiming responsibility for the attacks and demanded a law against what they called “forcible conversions”.
The brazenness of the attack shocked even the international community and Yediyurappa came under global pressure to act against the vigilantes. Where the pure RSS men accused him of being a puppet in the hands of the mining mafia and industry lobbies, liberal-progressive critics accused him of being a puppet in the hands of the RSS.
Yediyurappa responded by having Mahendra Kumar arrested within a week of the attacks but spared Puranik under pressure from the RSS. Later that month, even as communal tensions were at a high in the state, he defied Hindutva hardliners by feasting at an Iftar hosted by Muslims in Bengaluru’s Shivajinagar.
A few months after the church attacks, activists of Pramod Muthalik’s Sri Rama Sene attacked and molested women at a pub in Mangaluru because they supposedly violated Hindu culture. Despite overwhelming sympathy for the pub attack in the coast, Yediyurappa once again defied the Sangh and launched a crackdown on the Sri Rama Sene as well as the Bajrang Dal.
He did this by transferring senior police officers in the coast who were seen as enablers of the church and pub attacks. A batch of senior IPS officers handpicked by Yediyurappa were deputed to the region under the leadership of Gopal Hosur, who was made Inspector General of Police (Western Range). The team systematically cracked down on moral policing by Hindutva organisations and shut their illegal operations. The chief architect of the pub attack, Prasad Attavara, and his close associates were put behind bars in cases of extortion and trafficking.
Hindutva organisations were being put out of business when a Hindutva party was in power; the Sangh in coastal Karnataka was outraged. But despite all their protests, Yediyurappa persisted with the police officers for nearly as long as he was in power. People remember it as one of the few periods in the history of the region when the police actually did their job. The police officers were finally transferred when Yediyurappa started to lose his grip on power in the face of the corruption cases against him by the Lokayukta.
In his career, Yediyurappa has made a few spectacular saves to pull the state back from the brink of all-out sectarian strife. He has played a key role in preventing Karnataka from becoming another Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh. He contradicted his party during the anti-Hijab agitation and restrained Hindutva organisations by using the police during the mass uprising by Muslims against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in his third stint as CM.
He rushed to Mangaluru after two Muslims died in police firing during the agitation and immediately announced monetary compensation for the deceased. As soon as he entered the room in the Mangaluru circuit house where he had called a review meeting, he lambasted the IPS officer who had ordered the firing and threw him out of the room. He didn’t realise that some journalists were in the room when this happened.
After asking us to leave, he remained in discussions behind closed doors for several hours with district officials as well as BJP’s Hindutva hardliners Shobha Karandlaje and CT Ravi. When the meeting ended, Ravi and Karandlaje told the media that the compensation that was earlier announced by the CM would be disbursed only if the Muslims who had been killed are proved innocent in the rioting cases against them. While Yediyurappa did not make this announcement, he did not contradict it either when he was questioned about it later.
While he is no frothing-in-the-mouth proponent of militant Hindutva, it would be a stretch to describe Yediyurappa as a beacon of secularism. He hails from a community that is scripturally opposed to Vedic Brahminism and he has repeatedly clashed with Brahmins in the Sangh Parivar. But he is no flag-bearer of the non-Brahmin cause and has never invoked his Shudhra identity. Yediyurappa has consistently backed key Hindutva projects such as the ban on beef and religious conversions, and the implementation of blatantly anti-Muslim Uniform Civil Code and the NRC/CAA.
Some political observers feel that Yediyurappa is a benign face of a deeper ideological compromise between the followers of Madara Chennaiah, Basavanna, Allama Prabhu, and Akkamadevi, and the followers of Adi Shankracharya, Madhvacharya, and Ramanujacharya.
The process of Hinduisation and Sanskritisation of Lingayats, according to scholars, started as soon as Basavanna died following a massacre of his disciples by Brahminical counter-revolutionaries in the 12th century. Because of this Hinduisation over the centuries, it did not take long for Hindutva to take root in the community, goes the argument.
Yet the fact remains that the line that separates Brahmins from Veerashaiva Lingayats has not been erased through centuries of Sanskritisation. They have embraced Brahminism but have failed to become Brahmins. This basic contradiction has not been accepted without challenge. The two faith systems have contested each other as much as they have coexisted and borrowed from each other.
It can be argued that this duality marks the contrast between north and coastal Karnataka. Hindutva may be growing in influence in the parts of the north where Veerashaiva Lingayats dominate. But it is still materially different from Hindutva in coastal Karnataka and the larger Malnad region, which falls in the catchment area of the ancient Brahminical monasteries of Udupi and Sringeri whose followers dominate the RSS in the state. Hindutva in the districts of Shimoga, Udupi, Dakshina Kannada, Karwar, and Chikmagalur is any day more virulent than in the districts of north Karnataka.
This difference is not a coincidence but part of an ancient tussle for supremacy and control of sovereign power between Brahmins and non-Brahmins. In his essay ‘Revolution and Counter Revolution’, Ambedkar writes that the “history of India is nothing but a history of mortal conflict between Buddhism and Brahminism”.
Adi Shankaracharya’s Advaitha school of Brahminism, which laid the foundation for a major Hindu revivalist movement across the subcontinent, emerged from this friction with Buddhism. He started his pan-India movement in Karnataka by setting up the first of his four monasteries in Sringeri.
Many scholars have offered evidence to show that the earliest followers of Basavanna were those Kannada speaking communities of the Deccan who had descended from Buddhists. They had been subordinated as Shudhras and Untouchables with the revival of Brahminical Hinduism led by Shankaracharya in Sringeri and later by Madhvacharya’s Dvaita school in Udupi. While Shankaracharya tried to assimilate Buddhist philosophies into his doctrine, Madhvacharya was vehemently opposed to Buddhist and Jain influence on Hinduism.
Buddhism had mostly vanished from Karnataka when its anti-caste sentiment found an echo in the Vachana movement, which started in the 11th century with the poetry of a cobbler saint from the Madiga Dalit community. He was Madara Chennaiah, the guru of Basavanna.
Despite the influence of the Udupi and Sringeri schools, Vachana tradition continued to grow, sometimes as anti-caste Lingayatism and sometimes as Brahminical Veerashaivism. The revolutionary doctrine of the Lingayat faith, which is based on the rejection of the Vedas, Smritis and Upanishads, has found a way to coexist with Veerashaivism which represents a counter-revolutionary shift towards Vedic Brahminism.
The changing dynamics of the relationship between the non-Brahmin and the Brahmin have defined the ebb and flow of power in the subcontinent for thousands of years in both real and epic terms. It gave the Maratha regime of Shivaji and the Wodeyars of Karnataka an inherent anti-caste character. It shaped the post-Mandal phase of Indian politics that saw the rise of Shudhra leaders across the country. It is also the basic point of inflection between the Kauravas and Pandavas; Rama and Ravana; the demonic Rudra and his Brahminic reinterpretation, Shiva; Buddha and Brahma.
D Ravikumar, the Dalit writer and Member of Parliament from Tamil Nadu’s Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), offers a poignant take on this relationship, which is at the exclusion of Dalits, in his foreword to the book Dalits in Dravidian Land. The book is a journalist’s compilation of post independence atrocities against Dalits by the intermediary castes who were the backbone of the Dravidian movement. Explaining the contradiction of Periyar’s non-Brahmin movement, Ravikumar says that throughout Tamil history the relationship between Brahmins and non-Brahmins has “alternated between conflict and cooperation” going back to the Sangam era.
The Hinduisation or Sanskritisation of the followers of Basavanna is part of this ancient conflict and cooperation in response to the predominance of Brahmins and their ism. The period of cooperation is now coming to an end. The community’s topmost leaders – Yediyurappa, V Somanna, Jagadish Shettar, and Laxman Savadi – have either quit the BJP or have been sidelined by the Brahmins in the party. The results of the Assembly elections are unlikely to change the pecking order within the party any time soon.
The latent strain of Hindutva that has taken deep root among the Veerashaiva Lingayats will prevent a simple shift to the Congress or another secular party in the coming years. And their inherent contradiction with Brahminism will mean that they will never be able to fully integrate with the pure RSS.
In Maharashtra, this Hindutva paradox gave birth to the Shiv Sena, a party that is somehow more Hindu and less Brahmin. The party, which was built by working class Marathas in the urban pockets of Maharashtra, has constantly toggled between virulent Hindutva and militant non-Brahminism.
Under Uddhav Thackerey, the second Hindu party is now going through its non-Brahmin phase to counter the Brahmins of the BJP who toppled his government. It recently entered an alliance with the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) led by Ambedkar’s grandson, Prakash Ambedkar. As part of the rebranding, the party has started invoking Bal Thackerey’s father Prabodhankar Thackerey who preached a form of Hindutva that was defined by an intense aversion to the socio-cultural dominance of Brahmins.
In the last 20 years, the Veerashaiva Lingayats have tried to cooperate with the followers of Udupi and Sringeri monasteries. Things have come full circle and we are now entering a period of contest and conflict. This sentiment is either going to break the BJP or remake it. For now, Yeddyurappa seems to be the only leader capable of leading this movement. But at 81, age and health are not on his side.
Sudipto Mondal is the Executive Editor of The News Minute. He focuses on communalism, caste and corruption.