Hindu-Muslim violence was unheard of in Karnataka’s old Mysore region when former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda and the Janata Dal (Secular) were still in their element. Communal relations appear to have changed dramatically in these parts since then.
In its heyday, the success of the Vokkaliga dominated party and its patriarch was defined by the supremacist politics of the landed castes. Not Hindutva militancy.
Those were the days when the barely urban settlement of Maddur was a highway pitstop, famous for its vada. The pitstop is today almost a city thanks to the maze of expressways connecting it to Bengaluru, Mysuru, Mandya, and Hassan. Maddur, which is part of Mandya district, is also growing notorious for communal tensions.
The growing ideological bonds between the (secular) party led by the Gowda family and the Hindu nationalist movement led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have caused a visible dent on religious harmony in southern Karnataka. The emergence of the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) has added a new dimension to the already polarised environment.
The Sangh is clearly focused on building a bipartisan Hindu identity, arching over the social fractures caused by caste-based segregation in this feudal heartland. The rising influence of Hindu nationalism has not only consumed much of the JD(S) rank and file, it has also found supporters among sections of the Hindu leadership aligned with the ruling Congress.
By all accounts, Maddur is the latest and most visible example of this emerging social order. When the Hindu festival of Ganesha Chaturthi and the Muslim festival of Eid Milad coincided this year, the simmering tensions between the two communities boiled over.
On September 10, BJP and JD(S) leaders joined hands to lead a communally charged rally organised in Maddur. More than 2,000 police personnel, armed with automatic weapons, were deployed to maintain peace during the event where the controversial BJP leader CT Ravi threatened to “behead” Muslims.
Curiously, JD(S) leaders, although present on stage, had little to say. Former JD(S) MLA DC Thammanna, who represented Maddur thrice before losing to Uday KM of the Congress in 2023, only repeated what he had told the media previously — that the police failed to prevent the violence.
HD Kumaraswamy blamed the Congress for “destroying” the writer Kuvempu’s “vision of a ‘Garden of Peace’” in Maddur and in Nagamangala. “The appeasement politics of the Congress has created such a bad situation across Karnataka. The Congress is making Hindus unhappy. I’m not saying this for political reasons. The Congress is the cause of riots in many parts of Karnataka,” he said.
Kumaraswamy’s son Nikhil landed up in Maddur. He too blamed the Congress’ “appeasement politics” for the situation.
Speaking to TNM later, Thammanna repeated that the Congress government was to blame. “I represented Maddur three times before the Congress. Nothing happened during that time. The police failed to gather information and prevent the violence. The Congress’ appeasement politics is responsible for what happened.”
On the calls for beheading Muslims, Thammanna said, “People will express their opinions. You can’t control what people will say on a public platform. Saying such things is not acceptable for any reason. Such things should not be said. Just because we are in an alliance does not mean we all share the same opinion. People have the right to say what they want to say. People should decide what is right and what is wrong.”
The hate speeches and sabre-rattling at the rally were a culmination of two days of chaos and communal violence in Maddur that broke out in an area where the majority of the residents are Dalits and Muslims.
The incident that sparked the rioting is still shrouded in mystery but it gave Hindutva organisations the perfect ruse to isolate Muslims and unite Hindus across caste and political affiliations.
The violence in Maddur
It all started on the night of September 7 with a procession to immerse a Ganesha idol. As the festive procession passed through a slum in the heart of the city — ironically called Ram-Rahim Nagar — the revellers came under attack. The lights in the area suddenly went off and rocks flew out at them through the darkness from the direction of the Masjid-e-Usman-e-Ghani.
According to the case registered by the police, two of the Muslim men accused of stone pelting were office-bearers of the SDPI.
After the first stones were hurled, both sides threw stones at each other, and in the pelting, the glass panes that ran through the height of the mosque were damaged. Eight people were injured. The police broke up the crowd and convinced the organisers to carry out the immersion. Later that night, they arrested 21 Muslims.
Early the next morning, Hindutva organisations started mobilising massive crowds at the Ugra Narasimha Swamy temple in Maddur town in a show of strength. Local BJP and RSS leaders made impromptu speeches and soon, mobs took over the streets.
They tried to break the police cordon in an attempt to force their way towards Muslim houses, burnt a Muslim flag elsewhere, pelted stones, and tore down Eid Milad posters and buntings across town, and even threw stones at the police.
One of the people who was part of the mob that day was Sipayi Srinivas, the Mandya district convenor of the Sahakara Bharathi, an affiliate wing of the RSS that works in the cooperative sector. “It was not that a single organisation gave a call. We just put a message in a group. People came on their own. When we say Hindutva, it becomes a uniting symbol, we become one.”
No less than 6,000 people gathered, according to official estimates, as word about the stone pelting spread in the neighbouring villages. The police were caught off-guard.
On the regional TV channels, visuals of a Hindutva activist climbing up a pole, removing a green flag and replacing it with a saffron one were telecast on loop. Some people even pelted stones at the mosque but this did not make it to television news.
On September 9, the Inspector General of Police (Western Range) MB Boralingaiah told reporters that 500 people had been booked for provoking and participating in the riots of the previous day.
Asked whether stones had been pelted from the mosque, Boralingaiah clarified, “So far, it appears that no stones were thrown from inside the mosque. According to our information, stones were thrown from a lane near the mosque. We don’t have any videos or CCTV footage that shows stones being thrown from the mosque.”
The day after Boralingaiah’s press conference, Hindutva organisations called for a bandh in Maddur to protest the cases filed against their supporters. They organised the rally where JD(S) leaders joined BJP leaders such as CT Ravi to inflame passions further. The rally ended with a procession carrying 25 Ganesha idols to the Shimsha river for mass visarjan.
During last year’s Ganesha festivities, an even bigger riot broke out in another part of Mandya district – Nagamangala, about 50 km from Maddur. This riot also started during a procession to immerse an idol late on September 11, 2024. The revellers insisted on taking a route that passed in front of a mosque, despite not having police permission to do so and which the police failed to prevent.
Arguments between the two groups, with the police in the middle, soon descended into full-blown violence. Shops and vehicles were set ablaze, there was widespread looting, arson, and stone pelting. Most of the property damage was sustained by Muslims. What’s more, the incident also brought Hindus across party lines and caste walls onto a common platform against Muslims.
It’s a toolkit that has worked wonders for the Hindu nationalist party in other parts of the country but not in the southern districts of Karnataka because the primary contest so far was between the Congress and the JD(S). With the Vokkaliga party firming its Hindutva credentials, the BJP appears well placed to build an ideological base in the region.
A foothold in these districts could help push the BJP past the half-way mark of 113 in an Assembly with 224 seats — a feat it has never managed to achieve so far, forcing it to rely on coalitions.
The BJP’s highest tally was 110 in 2008 and 104 in 2018. In contrast, when the Congress formed a government in 2013 and 2023, both times headed by Siddaramaiah, the party secured 122 and 135 seats.
Ram-Rahim and Siddhartha
The stone pelting on September 7 occurred in a multicultural slum. Its residents – Vokkaligas, Dalits, Muslims, and even a few Brahmins – live inches apart in this tightly packed area.
The names of the enclaves indicate the presence of each community – Ram Rahim Nagar, Siddharth Nagar, and Channegowda Badavane. However, the others came together in large numbers against the Muslims in the area during the September 7 disturbances.
According to Shivu, Mandya district secretary of the Dalit Sangharsha Samiti (B Krishnappa faction), the majority of the residents in the area are Dalits followed by is Muslims. Two of three wards reserved for SCs in the 23-member Maddur Town Municipal Council are in this extension of the slum.
“This is the heart of Maddur taluk. Anybody in the taluk who needs any construction or agricultural workers will have to come here. People here do everything from masonry to welding, plumbing and painting,” Shivu said.
“There is no one here who can afford to eat without their daily wages. This is true of both Dalits and Muslims. Only a handful of either have a slightly higher economic status than this,” he added.
The three areas got their names at different points in time. When SM Krishna was Chief Minister (1999-2004), a mysterious fire reduced all the huts in the area to ashes. The residents only remember that Krishna’s government compensated them by rebuilding their houses with concrete. The newly built settlement was named Ram Rahim Nagar in recognition of Hindu and Muslim claims in the area.
The Dalit enclave of Siddharth Nagar got its name after Mahadeva, a Dalit member of the Maddur Town Municipal Council, moved a resolution in the late 1990s. Channegowda Badavane is spread over three acres and is named after the Vokkaliga landlord from whom the government acquired it in the 1960s. Many people in these three neighbourhoods still don’t have title deeds to their houses.
Srujan, a driver who lives in Siddharth Nagar, was in the procession when stones were thrown at it. Srujan and his uncle Raju have a long list of grouses against Muslims. “When someone dies, you can’t play the tamate (drum played during funerals) when you pass by the mosque. They object,” Raju said.
Asked at whose funeral objections were made, Raju simply continued to talk about other ways in which Muslims were supposedly hindering the lives of the Hindus.
Srujan did not attend the peace meeting called on September 9. “We didn’t get justice (for the stone pelting), so we didn’t go.”
But if the police arrested people for the stone pelting that very night, wasn’t it justice?
For a moment, Srujan was taken aback. Then, he said, “No, but what if they get released? Then we will not get justice.”
A Hindu identity
Beyond the locality where the stone pelting occurred, a Hindu identity appears to be forming among the residents of Maddur, driven by a larger Hindutva atmosphere in the country, efforts by the RSS, and the political climate in the state.
Fifty-seven-year old Lakshmana Channesandra from Channesandra village which neighbours Maddur town claimed that there was a law that mandated Hindus to have only two children while Muslims faced no such restrictions.
Asked which law this was, Lakshmana, the head of the local coconut growers’ association, said, “I’ll give you the records. The government should cut off welfare schemes for people who violate this law. Yogi Adityanath [UP Chief Minister] has already said he will do it. There should be one law for all.”
His friends tried to tell him that there was no such law, but the man only raised his voice and continued in the same vein.
A group of women at the BJP rally on September 10 told TNM that they had turned up after hearing about the stone pelting on Hindus. At that rally, BJP leaders MLC CT Ravi and former MP Sumalatha Ambareesh made incendiary speeches.
But in comparison with the turnout the morning after the stone throwing, the gathering at the protest called by the BJP and JDS was poor.
The senior RSS leader Sipayi Srinivas attributed it to divided political loyalties. “If you bring politics into it, issues will get diluted. If one party gives a call (for action), then people from another party will not come. Anyway, most of the people at the BJP rally were from the Congress,” Srinivas claimed, while conceding that many BJP and JDS workers were also there.
Asked how he knew that most of the people at the BJP rally were from the Congress, he revealed that he worked closely with leaders from the party.
He proudly recounted that in the previous state Assembly elections, he had backed the Congress candidate in Maddur, Uday KM. The businessman, who had switched from the BJP to the Congress just two months before the elections, also happens to be Srinivas’s classmate from school. In his previous avatar, Uday gained attention in the state as one of the key people in BS Yeddiyurappa’s Operation Lotus that had brought the BJP to power in 2019.
The ‘Sipayi’ in Srinivas’s name comes from his 17-year career in the army. After retiring from the army in 2014, he decided to join the RSS. “After returning from the military, what will you look for? Dharma. That’s why I joined the RSS,” he said.
Elsewhere in the district, other factors at work are also creating a Hindu identity.
A 45-year-old resident of Maddur, who requested anonymity as he is a government employee, said his Lingayat neighbour invited his 12-year-old daughter for a religious discourse at a local Ishwara temple to which Lingayats often invite seers.
“She came back and said that the speaker was abusing Muslims and Siddaramaiah,” he said.
Selective arrests
The Mandya district police registered 10 FIRs in connection with the stone pelting and subsequent developments.
A senior police officer in Mandya district told TNM that two of the people — Tanveer and Nasru — arrested in a suo motu FIR filed over the stone pelting were office-bearers of the SDPI. “They were the ones behind the whole conspiracy.”
SDPI Karnataka president Abdul Majeed initially claimed that Maddur did not even have a party unit, and later refused to confirm whether or not those arrested were members of the SDPI.
In the 2023 Assembly elections, the SDPI contested 16 seats and lost its deposit in 15. It got slightly over 90,000 votes, translating to less than 1% of the vote share.
Jagadish Nagarakere, an activist with Karnataka Janashakti in Maddur, conceded the SDPI’s possible influence. “But you can’t compare the situation here to Dakshina Kannada. Here, Muslims need Hindus to survive economically. The accused may have been influenced by the SDPI, but the only organisation mobilising people systematically here is the RSS.”
Other cases filed by the police include two against the mobs which gathered despite prohibitory orders and burned Eid banners; three hate speech cases against a woman who abused Muslims; two FIRs against CT Ravi and one against Basanagouda Patil Yatnal for hate speech.
Action taken on the FIRs does not appear to be even-handed.
While the police arrested 32 people, all Muslims, for throwing stones at the Ganesha procession within hours, no one has been arrested for throwing stones at the Masjid-e-Usman-e-Ghani, or gathering in violation of prohibitory orders on September 8.
Asked why, senior police officers did not have a clear answer a few days after the incident. One senior police officer told TNM, “The situation is (volatile) right now. We haven’t yet decided on arresting them. We are considering how to go about the case. There are ways to chargesheet people without arresting them.”
Later, the same officer confirmed that the police had identified around 200 people for gathering around Maddur in violation of prohibitory orders, but there were no plans to arrest them. The police would file a chargesheet after summoning them for questioning. However, he also said that eight more people were yet to be arrested for the stone pelting at the Ganesha procession.
The police’s inaction and the media narrative around the stone pelting have angered the Muslim residents of the three neighbourhoods. Many of the Muslim women alleged that men in their families who had been arrested were innocent.
Thirty-four-year-old Fahima told TNM that the police turned up at her house at 2 am on September 8 and took her husband Sikandar Ali, a welder.
“I have four kids. Who’s going to look after us? Will people hire my husband again? His face is all over the news. If something happens to him, who’s going to be responsible?” Fahima said.
The Maddur advocates association had declared that it would not represent those accused of stone pelting. About 10 of the accused have gotten bail through lawyers from Mandya.
Shortly after TNM began to talk to Fahima, several women from Ram Rahim Nagar and Siddharth Nagar surrounded us with stories of how men in their families had been picked up by the police in the dead of the night.
One woman said angrily, “When something happens, people do turn up to watch. Can the police pick up every one and go?”
A senior police officer admitted as much. “We saw the CCTV footage. There were only two or three people who threw stones.” Asked why the rest had then been picked up, he said, “Why should they stand and watch? When people gather, it leads to trouble.”
According to the police, trouble has been brewing for a while over small issues. One senior police officer told TNM, “During the peace meeting, we called leaders of both sides and they all had the same complaints against each other. Someone parked a car wrong, or stared too much, leading to arguments. This has led to friction between the youth. We’ve deployed a police van there to keep an eye on things. We’ve also assigned personnel to patrol the area. If we are there, we will know what is going on and can intervene.”
Dalits, Muslims, and Vokkaligas
Although the BJP and the Sangh have a traditional base in coastal Karnataka, their presence across the rest of the state is uneven.
In parts of north Karnataka, the BJP has been winning Assembly seats for years but acceptance among the public for the Hindutva rhetoric varies. In comparison, the old Mysore region had neither voted for the BJP significantly nor accepted the Hindutva discourse until recently.
Of the seven Assembly constituencies in Mandya district, for instance, the BJP’s vote share rose to double digits in five seats in 2023, compared to just one in 2018. Its highest vote share in 2018 was the 19% it got in the Mandya seat; in the other constituencies, its vote share did not cross 6%.
One reason why the BJP’s vote share has traditionally remained low in the region is the presence of the Vokkaliga community, which identifies strongly with its caste even though its votes are split between the Congress and the JD(S).
Sources in the JD(S) attribute the BJP’s electoral gains in southern Karnataka in the last Assembly election to a loss of its own vote share, which was preceded by several communal flare-ups in Mandya district.
In February 2022, a month after a vicious campaign against Muslim students wearing the hijab to college began in Udupi, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) launched a similar one in Mandya.
The end of that year also saw BJP leaders attempt a high profile campaign to attract Vokkaligas by claiming that it was two Vokkaliga men Uri Gowda and Nanje Gowda, and not the British, who killed Tipu Sultan.
Read: BJP propagates fiction as history: ‘Uri and Nanje Gowda killed Tipu Sultan’
Political observers say the lack of enthusiasm in the old Mysore region for the Sangh’s anti-Muslim campaign so far is because of the centuries-old links between Vokkaligas and Muslims. Tipu Sultan’s immensely popular land and taxation policies inadvertently laid the foundation for this bond.
Several historians have chronicled that Tipu exercised land grant and tax concession policies which weakened local feudal powers, benefitted the peasantry and consolidated his control over his kingdom.
Tipu did away with jagirs (villages granted to feudal lords for revenue) and reduced financial grants to temples. He also took over lands granted to Brahmins, maths, and temples in Melukote, Piriyapatna, and Nanjangud and to Jains in Moodbidri. Tipu eventually gave them pensions that were a fraction of the revenue they previously enjoyed from these lands. This land was redistributed to peasants.
Other social groups which received land were soldiers in the army, which included Dalits; members of standing militias, and Dalits in charge of supplying water from village tanks.
A testimony to the popularity of his 17-year rule is to be found in lavanis, a folk ballad prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lavanis about Tipu and Haidar Ali were compiled by Lingadevaru Halemane in a book called Dhira Tipuvina Lavanigalu (Lavanis of Tipu the brave).
B Peer Basha, a Gangavathi-based writer, says, “Folk songs never turn anti-people figures into cultural heroes.”
According to Bengaluru-based activist Shivasundar, Tipu’s policies had a political afterlife. They set the stage for struggles that Shudras, including Vokkaligas, and Muslims waged together against Brahminical domination after the British handed over the Mysore kingdom to the Wodeyars in 1881.
In 1921, the king of Mysore, Nalwadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar, approved reservation for non-Brahmins in the bureaucracy.
Brahmin resentment over the reservations and against the appointment of Mirza Ismail as Dewan (1926-41) was exposed nearly eight years later. The Mysore government appointed a committee headed by M Visvesvaraya, a Telugu Brahmin, to investigate communal clashes in Bengaluru in 1928.
The committee noted that five newspapers – Veerakesari, Viswakarnataka, Prajamitra, Navajivana, and The Mysore Star – ran a hostile campaign against the government and the Dewan Mirza Ismail, and spread rumours which contributed to the communal violence in June-July 1928.
According to Shivasundar, Brahmin resentment made Shudras and Muslims allies. “There was a common enemy and the need for fighting together for reservations. This also became a cause for Shudra-Muslim fraternity.”
Around this time, Vokkaligas were also consolidating as a caste in competition with Lingayats. They started the Vokkaliga Sangha in 1906 and a Kannada weekly called Vokkaligara Patrike a year later.
The movement for the unification of Kannada-speaking areas was beginning in the early 20th century, but after Independence, Vokkaligas were not in favour of this merger because they feared Lingayat domination.
These fears turned out to be prescient. It was only in 1994, 38 years after the linguistic reorganisation of states, that Karnataka got its first Vokkaliga chief minister in HD Deve Gowda. The three chief ministers of Mysore state before linguistic reorganisation were Vokkaligas.
But by this time, Devaraj Urs’ coalition of backward castes, which won the 1972 and 1978 Assembly elections, had realigned the balance of power in favour of the smaller backward castes.
Both Lingayats and Vokkaligas resented this even as they continued to compete against each other for power through the 1980s. In the 1990s, a large number of Lingayats ditched the Congress for the BJP after their leader Veerendra Patil was fired from his post as CM by Rajiv Gandhi.
These developments, spanning a hundred years, saw the Vokkaligas consolidate as a caste bloc whose loyalties eventually got divided between the Congress and the JD(S) under Deve Gowda.
Guruprasad Keragodu, who heads the Dalit Sangharsha Samiti (DSS) in Mandya district, pointed out that violence in the region was primarily directed at Dalits by Vokkaligas until the emergence of the Raitha Sangha (farmers’ movement) in the 1980s, which followed close on the heels of the of the newly formed militant DSS.
“But that changed after Puttannaiah became the president of the Raitha Sangha. The farmers’ and Dalit movements built links which took effect over time. The Raitha Sangha and the DSS formed the Sarvodaya Party. Puttannaiah used to often say in meetings that the DSS was a more humanitarian organisation than the farmers’ group. After the mid-1990s, disputes did not descend into violence. They were solved through dialogue. There is some fraternity between Vokkaligas and Dalits due to that.”
A senior JD(S) leader pointed out that HD Kumaraswamy was known to take on the RSS ideologically before the alliance. “He would even pull up party workers if they said anything (Islamophobic). In fact, we were more secular than Congress leaders all this time.”
In 2021, Kumaraswamy wrote a scathing piece in Kannada daily Prajavani criticising the RSS, raising the very same questions that Minister Priyank Kharge is raising today on the RSS being an unregistered body and its refusal to hoist the national flag.
Deve Gowda had once said that he would wish to be born as a Muslim.
Even though the JD(S) has aligned with the BJP in the past, even forming a government in coalition with the saffron party, the alliance did not involve ideological capitulation. Now, however, all bets are off.
The RSS in Mandya
The JD(S)’s alliance with the BJP coincides with a Hindutva push in the region. One crucial element in this equation is the Ganesh Chathurthi processions that the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) has spearheaded.
A VHP leader in Mandya district told TNM that since 2024 the VHP had been organising mass Ganesha processions in urban areas such as Mandya, Nagamangala, and Maddur through the Hindu Hitarakshana Samiti. The Samiti is a Hindutva outfit promoted in RSS WhatsApp groups and by RSS-run media.
“Everybody does their own pooje. But on the day of the immersion, from morning to night, everything – the procession, the immersion, and all other events – is our responsibility. It took a while to convince people to do it this way. This year in Nagamangala we immersed 11 idols together,” the leader said.
Asked why everyone should hold the procession together, he said, “You know why Tilak did Ganesha processions publicly? To bring everyone together. We (Hindus) were destroyed by insiders, not outsiders.”
In Maddur during the peace meeting held by the district administration it was decided that a mass immersion would be conducted.
Guruswamy, the Maddur taluk convenor of the RSS, claimed credit for organising the Maddur mass immersion. “We immersed 14 idols through the Hindu Hitarakshana Samiti. More than 20 organisations are part of the Samiti.”
Guruswamy, who owns a shamiyana rental business in Maddur, joined the RSS as an 18-year-old and participated in the kar seva that brought down the Babri Masjid in December 1992. “But before that, we did ittige pooje for the Ram temple in about 50 villages all over the taluk,” Guruswamy told TNM.
He claims that in 1983, he led a campaign against a man whom they had caught transporting beef. “For two days Maddur was shut down. But the police lathicharged us to protect the man with the maal.” These claims could not be independently verified.
But despite this, it wasn’t until about 20 years ago that the Sangh began to seriously attempt to get a foothold in the Old Mysore region. It started with small gestures such as an RSS invitation to the seer of the influential Adi Chunchunagiri Math, which is revered by Vokkaligas, in 2005. The seer did not participate due to pressure from progressives. Twelve years later, Union Minister Amit Shah visited the Adi Chunchanagiri Math in Mandya district in August 2017.
Activist MB Naganna, who was part of the now defunct Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedike, told TNM that there have been attempts to replicate in Mandya what was done in Baba Budangiri in Chikkamaglur district. In the late 1980s, the Sangh had initiated a campaign claiming that the Baba Budangiri Sufi shrine was a Hindu temple dedicated to the deity Dattatreya. Hindutva outfits eventually began an annual pilgrimage in December called Datta Maala.
Similarly in Mandya’s Srirangapattana, Hindutva activists and BJP leaders have claimed that Tipu Sultan razed an Anjaneya temple to build the Jama Masjid.
“Around eight years ago, they started organising a Bhairava maale ritual at the Anjaneya temple, along the lines of the Datta Maala in Baba Budangiri. But that didn’t take off. Then six years ago, they came up with Hanuman maale. They make communal speeches at such events each year,” Naganna had told TNM last year. The Hanuman maale is held every year in December.
The fictitious story of the Vokkaliga men Uri Gowda and Nanje Gowda killing Tipu Sultan followed in 2022.
A major flashpoint occurred in January 2024 in Keragodu, around 30 km from Maddur, when a row broke out over a Hanuman flag. Although BJP leaders took an expected line, the real surprise was HD Kumaraswamy, who turned up in Keragodu discarding the JD(S)’s green colours in favour of a saffron shawl.
Even when the RSS was carrying out the ittige pooje, it was the DSS that protested, says Guruprasad Keragodu of the DSS. “HL Keshavamurthy, who was a reporter at Lankesh; Besarahalli Ramaiah, a doctor; and many of us protested when they did the ittige pooje.” Lankesh was a tabloid run by a writer named P Lankesh and had a reputation for challenging those in power.
Even now, the DSS is taking on the BJP-JD(S) combine at the local level. Guruprasad said that recently a controversy broke out over the naming of a road in Keragodu.
“It had already been decided in 1972 that the road would be named after Ambedkar. But the BJP-JD(S) wanted to name it after Kempegowda. We intervened, saying it would be an insult to both men to change it now. We suggested they name another road after Kempegowda. We told our Dalit groups to be cautious because they’re always raring to create trouble.”
The VHP leader from Mandya claimed that the alliance had benefitted the Sangh as more people were now curious about Hindutva and the Sangh’s activities.
Bengaluru-based professor A Narayana too believes that the alliance will benefit the BJP more than the JD(S), but cautions against a simple reading. Pointing to the public disagreements between the two parties, he said,. “There is an uneasy equilibrium for the time being. They have set up a coordination committee for Bengaluru local body polls, which tells you that not everything is alright between the two parties.”
He also said that a section of progressive Vokkaligas still have enough clout to put pressure on the Adi Chunchanagiri seer and are resisting the Brahminical ideology pushed by the BJP. “They forced the Sahitya Sammelana to serve eggs for the first time in its history.”
Read: Aroma of protest: Meat served at Kannada Sahitya Sammelana for the first time in 100 years
The tulsi and the banyan tree
Abhishek HP joined the RSS as a teenager 15 years ago. In his early 30s now, he has been the Maddur taluk karyavah for the past five years.
Although he claimed that he did not support any political party, Abhishek said he admired HD Kumaraswamy and HD Deve Gowda in the past because he identified with them through caste. “At one time, I had caste pride. But then when I see these leaders and what the Sangh leaders do… after learning about dharma, rashtra, and deshaprema, I feel caste is wrong.”
Asked if he no longer feels any caste pride, Abhishek said, “No, it’s not like that. Your caste should be like the tulsi plant in your home, but religion should be like the banyan tree of the village. Once you believe in nationalism, you can’t go back. I will support them (JDS), but I won’t go back.”
Abhishek’s remarks bring to mind the caste-religion contradiction in the Sangh expressed by several Shudra men in coastal Karnataka who spent decades believing in Hindutva but eventually realised that their acceptance and growth within the RSS were constrained by their caste even though they identified themselves as Hindu and not in terms of their caste.
Read: Brahmins vs Bajrangis: Caste trumps Hindutva in Naveen Soorinje’s latest book
A senior JD(S) leader said that the party had done an internal study on people like Abhishek who appeared to be JD(S) supporters but also identified with the Sangh’s ideology.
“There are very few such people. They’re all Vokkaligas who were influenced by Hindutva ideology WhatsApp forwards and the RSS for a long time, and much before the alliance. They support the BJP because they’re anti-Congress. They were only in the JD(S) because they were in constituencies where the BJP does not have a base,” he said.
However, the leader conceded that in the 2018 and 2023 elections, the BJP had retained its vote share but the JD(S)’s had dropped. “The BJP’s vote share increased in southern Karnataka not because people believed their ideology but because they poached some of our leaders and were able to get votes. A Swami in Maddur, a Gautam in Ramnagara…”
Swami SP, or Swami Gowda as his associates call him, quit the JD(S) to join the BJP in Maddur 10 years ago.
TNM spoke to Swami at the BJP’s Maddur office, a new building with a large hall that had one wall plastered with a larger-than-life picture of him with PM Narendra Modi. The picture was taken in June 2022 during a ‘Yoga for Humanity’ programme.
Swami said that he ended his decades-long association with the JD(S) — his wife and brother are former members of the Maddur Town Municipal Council, elected on a JDS ticket — inspired by PM Modi’s work. He took some of his associates with him.
Manu Kesthoor, Swami’s associate, told TNM that initially it was very difficult for the BJP to build support. “There was a lot of work, but no leader. After Swami came to the BJP, people saw all the good work that he had done,” Manu said.
Swami is well-known locally for the charitable activities he has carried out for decades through a trust run in the name of his son. Swami said he donated to religious activities such as building new temples and conducting jeernodhara ceremonies, distributed free books to children, and ran health and blood donation camps.
In 2022, he claims he distributed 500 Ganesha idols to cultural groups that performed religious plays and to others who sought free idols. “Now, if people ask for help to set up a Ganesha idol, I give them cash,” Swami told TNM.
However, a local journalist said that Swami wasn’t the only one who distributed Ganesha idols that year — which was just months before the 2023 Assembly elections in May. Leaders from other political parties too did the same.
The mushrooming of Ganesha idols in the last few years has made people in the region wary, given that sporadic communal violence occurs across the state during processions each year.
“Twenty years ago there would be about 8-10 Ganeshas in a town. Now, nearly every street has one and leaders of all parties give money towards that. Young people put on DJ music and dance in the processions. The BJP didn’t have enough workers to put up banners during the last election, but they are getting more popular. A pro-Hindu vote has built up and no one wants to be seen as opposed to religious festivities,” says activist MB Naganna.
He claimed that even local Congress leaders are pro-BJP. “After the Nagamangala violence last year, the Bajrang Dal organised a rally where 10,000 people gathered. It was Nagamangala MLA Cheluvarayaswamy who flagged it off and sponsored it.”
Congress support for Hinduism is simply normal for Sipayi Srinivas. Asked why he supported his classmate KM Uday who contested on a Congress ticket when the party was so critical of the RSS, Srinivas shrugged it off.
“See, our MLA isn’t like that. He doesn’t talk against religion. Hindu workers should be there in all parties. Uday stands with dharma when push comes to shove. What’s greater than that? RSS says that Hindus should be there in all parties. Then when there is a problem, people will be there to solve it. Isn’t that good?