Karnataka springboard for Hindutva expansion in South India.

The Hindu
March 15, 2009

Hindutva’s ideological testing ground in South

Parvathi Menon

Communalism as a political mobilisation strategy is active in the coastal regions of Karnataka, which the BJP sees as the springboard for its expansion in South India.

Over the last nine months, there has been a dramatic increase in the incidents of communal violence in Karnataka’s coastal regions, particularly in the districts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi. It is an electorate deeply polarised along communal lines that faces the Lok Sabha elections in April.

The reasons for this are not far to seek. Although the region has seen periodic outbreaks of communal violence over the last decade, the assumption of office by Karnataka’s first Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in May 2008 saw a sharp upswing in the intensity of violence, with a qualitatively different pattern emerging. Youth organisations like the Bajrang Dal, Hindu Jagaran Vedike, and Sri Rama Sene, which broadly fall under the ideological mantle of the Sangh Parivar, went on a new offensive. The religious institutions of minorities were physically targeted in a campaign that peaked in August-September 2008 (for a timeline of the attacks see http://www.hindu.com/2008/09/26/stories/ 20080926 51370700.htm). It was under sustained pressure from secular parties, Christian groups, and the media that the State government set up a commission of inquiry in February 2009 under Justice B.K. Somashekhara to look into the incidents.

Grotesque forms of moral policing by Hindutva organisations are on the increase. Many of these episodes go under-reported in the mainstream media and remain unchallenged by civil society simply because the law and order machinery is perceived as too weak and too partisan to challenge the writ of these groups. State Ministers routinely underplay the seriousness of the incident in their public statements. (Home Minister, V.S. Acharya, for example, condemned the brutal assault by Sri Rama Sene activists on women in a Mangalore pub on January 24, with the caveat that the pub culture is alien to the Indian ethos.)

The fact that the offenders claim immediate responsibility for their actions — in the pub attack, the electronic media was informed in advance — is itself a measure of their self-assurance in the BJP dispensation. In the pub case, the police made arrests, including that of Pramod Mutalik, the Ram Sene chief, two days after the incident (they were later released on bail). But in many cases of moral policing by Hindutva youth groups, the offenders act as ‘informants’ or assistants to the police by taking the victims to stations and getting the police to register cases against them.

It is in what is perhaps Karnataka’s most advanced region that such militant intolerance has found its soil. An extension of Kerala in respect of its human development indices, Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts stand second and third in their Human Development Index ranking in the State. Between them, they have some of the most successful privately owned institutions of higher professional education in the country. Mangalore is the second fastest growing city of Karnataka, a major industrial and commercial hub, and the centre of the state’s banking sector.

Christians in Dakshina Kannada are a successful and well-integrated community with a strong presence in higher education, and constitute eight per cent of the population. Muslims constitute 22 per cent and Hindus just over 68 per cent, according to the 2001 Census.

As centres of higher education, Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts attract tens of thousands of students from all parts of the country. The tentacles of the Hindutva vigilante groups have penetrated the well-developed bus transport network in this region that ferries thousands of students every day from their homes and hostels to schools and colleges, even from as far as neighbouring Kerala. Bus travel is a great equaliser. It would ordinarily tend to break the barriers of gender, class, religion, and language in the large student body that uses it. It is therefore not surprising that buses have come under the close surveillance of vigilante groups.

Today the fear of the Bajrang Dal’s unofficial policing system prevents boys and girls from different religions sitting together or chatting on a bus or at a bus stop. If this does happen, word is quickly passed on, often by the bus conductors and drivers to Bajrang Dal activists who stop the bus, berate and abuse the students, and from time to time assault them.

Between the third week of July and the beginning of September of 2008, according to police records, there were 10 instances of vigilante groups punishing individuals who in their view violated the moral code by mixing with persons from other religions, this newspaper reported. ( www.thehindu.com/2008/09/07stories/ 2008090750160100.htm). The Bajrang Dal claimed responsibility for seven of these. Its district head, Sudarshan Moodabidri, told The Hindu reporter that his outfit had “solved” over 200 cases in the previous two months. “Sometimes it is necessary to use force,” he was quoted as saying. “Girls reform themselves once they are thrashed and humiliated in public, but boys are tougher to control.”

Hindutva vigilantism has found its echo in minority vigilantism, which however is not comparable to its majoritarian counterpart in its striking power. Ironically, in one of these 10 incidents, the Social Action Committee, a Christian vigilante group, carried out a joint operation with the Bajrang Dal (“we will carry more such strikes” its president, Deepak D’Mello, promised). Two cases were linked to former activists of the Karnataka Forum for Dignity, a conservative Islamicist organisation that has now merged with the Popular Front of India. Mixed couples found in public places were abused and assaulted, and in one case in Puttur taluk, Bajrang Dal activists stormed the house of a Muslim girl because her Hindu friend was visiting with her.

The infamous pub attack on January 24 was followed by two shocking episodes. On February 6, the daughter of a Kerala politician and her Muslim friend were the victims of attack. On February 11, a Bajrang Dal operation had tragic consequences. The victim, a 14-year old school girl from Mulky taluk, committed suicide, unable to face public humiliation for the ‘crime’ of befriending a Muslim bus conductor. In this case, the police has taken no action against the Bajrang Dal hooligans. The reason for this, the Mangalore district Superintendent of Police explained to a television channel, was that “there could be a communal riot” if they arrested the hooligans.

In Panja village, 100 km from Mangalore, the local unit of the Akhila Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad has imposed a ban on Muslim girls wearing the burkha at the local government college. (reported in The Hindu, Karnataka edition on March 3 and 4, 2009).

Victims of Hindutva-sponsored violence have little confidence in the impartiality of the district police. The same police have been overzealous in dealing with critics of the regime. B.V. Seetaram, chairman of the Mangalore-based Chitra group of publications that brings out the eveninger Karavali Ale, has paid a heavy price for his anti-establishment reportage. His newspaper office was vandalised, the paper’s distribution network was disrupted, vendors were attacked and newspaper bundles were burnt. His complaints to the police went unheeded although they took action in respect of eight criminal complaints filed against him on allegations of promoting religious hatred.

Mr. Seetaram was arrested on January 4, 2009 and produced before the Udupi Sessions Court in handcuffs. He was released only on the intervention of the Karnataka High Court, which sharply upbraided the police and district administration and imposed a sum of Rs. 10,000 on them for damages.

In the Indian political experience, an electorate polarised on religious lines yields rich electoral dividends for communal parties. Coastal Karnataka appears to be no exception. There are ominous elements of similarity between the present situation on the west coast and the pre-1991 election scenario in Uttar Pradesh when the Ayodhya movement unleashed a wave of communal violence. If Karnataka, as the BJP says, is the springboard for its expansion in the South, then the coastal region is decidedly its ideological testing ground.