outlook, 6 November 2008
BANGALORE BYTE
November Regrets
In Karnataka, the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike activists have still not attained the 'stature' of the Shiv Sena or the MNS in Maharastra, but they want to believe that they are on their way and will soon get there... ...
by Sugata Srinivasaraju
Raj Thackarey has refused to fade away from the headlines. It's two weeks since his men, the Maharastra Navanirman Sena (MNS) activists, lynched north Indian job-seekers at a railway recruitment centre in Mumbai, but the repercussions and revenge are only slowly unfolding. It is not the first time that 'outsider' job-seekers have been attacked somewhere in the country. North Indians seeking railway jobs were attacked many months ago in Bangalore, for example, but, somehow the issue did not assume the dimensions of the Mumbai attack.
The attacks in Bangalore were carried out by the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike (KRV), a self-styled quasi political forum to 'protect' Kannada and Karnataka. This group has led many attacks in the name of regional pride and as recently as November 1, the state's formation day, it attacked an FM radio station in Mysore for airing Hindi songs. This organisation routinely holds out threats to individuals and orgnisations, but has, by and large, escaped law enforcement authorities. Or rather, the government has been accommodative of them, just like the issue of MNS has been soft-pedaled in Maharastra. The situation is no different across the country -- be it Assam, West Bengal, Maharastra, Tamilnadu or Karnataka, rogue elements have always taken refuge behind regionalism. One could well say that organisations such as MNS and KRV have given a bad name to regional or language politics.
Since it is commercial interests and not commitment to a cause that fuels these activists, politicians cutting across partylines often make use of these outfits to suit their narrow ends. Their help is often sought to organise protests, shout slogans, picket, wave black flags, unleash carefully-controlled violence (where the size of the stones to be pelted are pre-determined) and also blackmail daily wage workers, traders and corporates. It is a fairly well-known story in Bangalore that some Kannada activists collect a 'hafta' from shopkeepers and set up protests in front of software companies to simply make money and more money.
Come November, the Rajyotsava month, huge sums are collected to put up roadside tents that blare out Kannada film songs day in and day out. In Karnataka, the KRV activists have still not attained the 'stature' of the Shiv Sena or the MNS in Maharastra, but they want to believe that they are on their way and will soon get there. The biggest cutouts and posters that you will find in any part of Bangalore today is not that of politicians, but that of thick-mustached and pot-belied language activists. In the near future, we may be in need of a separate movement to rescue all that is local and regional from these people. We may have to rescue Kannada and Kannadigas from 'its own' activists.
Some years ago, a joke about these type of activists in the Kannada literary circles was that if they ask you for money to celebrate Rajyotsava, give them a piece of paper and pen and ask them to write all the letters of the Kannada alphabet. The understanding was since they would invariably fail, you'd be spared of pulling out your purse. Let me remind you, this joke about the activist was some years ago. Then, you could crack a joke about or at them and shoo them away. Not anymore. You are likely to be ruffed up or knocked down if you dare suggest anything close to it. Your house will be circled by their fleet of autorickshaws flaunting the red and yellow flag. The Kannada flag, instead of evoking respect, spreads fear and numbs the emotion. When there is a bandh call issued in the state, it is funny to watch how the red and yellow flags flutter over glazed commercial buildings, like a token of surrender in a war zone.
But the language activists who were respected a generation ago were a different species.
Even then, you wouldn't agree with their philosophy of exclusion, but you never suspected their personal sacrifice and commitment for the cause of the language and the geographical spread that contained it. You never agreed with their path, but you gave them space and heard them out. In the context of Karnataka, this kind of activism was symbolised by such people as Prof. M. Chidanandamurthy and his Kannada Shakti Kendra. One should also acknowledge the benign Kannada activism of people like Rajkumar, who never endorsed violence. At one point, when he learnt that his fan association was misusing his name, he quietly distanced himself from it. Rajkumar never leveraged his position as a popular film star and language activist to contest elections or endorse political parties like many Tamil and Telugu stars do. At one point when some members of Rajkumar's fans association ambitiously contested a few Assembly seats, they failed to retain their deposits. That was the determination with which the Kannada people punished any excess in the name of language or region. There were the dumb types as in the joke above, but they were not mainstream: they were quite simply a joke. Scholar-activists like Chidanandamurthy were avid pamphleteers. They believed in developing a logic, however sophistic and skewed it may have appeared to you. They believed in democratically submitting memorandums to chief ministers. They thought they should fill up news columns and the letters page in local newspapers to influence opinion. But today's activists trusts their muscle more than a memorandum. They can actually be the scum of any political party.
The old-style language activists are in a dilemma when it comes to their new-age counterparts. They are at a loss of words about these people who have usurped the space they created with personal sacrifice and small donations. Their slogans have all been appropriated. The intellectual component in Kannada activism has been extinguished. The common pursuit they tried to create for the community has been replaced by individual ambitions. Where the old activist types could raise a few hundreds for the language cause, the new types can raise lakhs, if not crores. While the old types used public transport, the new types move around in SUVs.
The fact that the old activist is a troubled soul was evident when I recently met Ra. Nam. Chandrashekar, a right-hand man of Prof. Chidanandamurthy for decades. He is in a strange dilemma. He cannot openly condemn the 'new activist' because he is afraid that people may not distinguish between the old and the new. They may only establish a continuity and are unlikely to hair-split. Chandrashekar wants to shout out to the world that he is the 'real' activist; that his integrity is still intact and his identity is different. But since he is unable to recover his voice, he is seriously engaged in documenting the honourable past of Kannada activism.
Chandrashekar would have been disappointed further had I shared with him what I heard from a Kannada lecturer in a local college. Her students have been pressuring her to call the notorious leader of the new-age Kannada activists, Narayana Gowda, to inaugurate her college Kannada Sangha. If she spikes the choice of Narayana Gowda, then the students are likely to suggest the name of Muthappa Rai, a former Dubai-based don, who now runs a Kannada party called 'Jaya Karnataka' or would want somebody from the equally militant 'Karunada Sene'. This Kannada teacher, who has her reading and taste in place, now somewhat regrets having started a Kannada Sangha in her college. She had not realised that her choices would be severely limited.
It is ironical that November, the Rajyotsava month, is full of regrets about people who have come to occupy the Kannada space.
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