Karnataka: the bastian of Hindutva

Outlook Magazine, February 9, 2009

KARNATAKA

Deccan, Chronic?

Judging by recent events, the IT state seems to be becoming the new bastion of Hindu intolerance. What led up to this, and what's next?

Sugata Srinivasaraju

Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa’s New Year card had a solemn wish. He hoped 2009 would be "free of violence, hate and that peace would flourish". It now appears that it was purely a personal wish and not that of his government, party or the larger saffron parivar he belongs to. Even before the memories of the church attacks in September 2008 could fade, the very same custodians of ‘Hindu morals’ and votaries of a ‘Hindu rashtra’ turned their ire on women guests at the Amnesia Lounge Bar in Balmatta, Mangalore, on January 25. One expected the chief minister to be embarrassed by the shocking incident.
"It’s all media hype. A small, trivial incident has been blown out of proportion. The media has devalued itself." V.S. Acharya, Karnataka home minister	He wasn’t. Instead, he looked perplexed and in denial. Approached by Outlook, he asserted that there has been "no major law and order problem" since he came to power last year. His home minister Dr V.S. Acharya too was dismissive. "It’s all media hype," he said. "A small and trivial incident has been blown out of proportion. It is nonsense. The media has devalued itself by reporting it." Acharya’s

attitude had been no different last season when, radiating from epicentre Mangalore, churches across the state were attacked. "Why such a fuss when no deaths have occurred," he is reported to have said. "The situation was under control within two days," he had added, prompting his former party colleague and MP H.T. Sangliana to say that the home minister speaks like a "fire brigade officer". Acharya stuck to the script this January 25 as well, declaring that the situation in the precincts of the pub was brought under control within 10 minutes of the incident. It’s this apparent lack of remorse that troubles many.
Says a teacher at a Catholic institution in Mangalore: "They seem to be confusing their simple majority government for a Hindu majority government." The government’s reaction too seems to be following a set pattern. When the attacks on churches broke out, it tactically distanced itself from the Bajrang Dal, which was seen as the major aggressor, and arrested its local chief, Mahendra Kumar. This time too, the government is dissociating	"When Yediyurappa took office, he spoke of the Gujarat model of development. We now realise what he meant." D.K. Shiva Kumar, KPCC working President

itself from the culprit, the Sri Rama Sene. "The Rama Sene is not part of the parivar, its national chief Pramod Mutalik was publicly disowned by us four years ago," said a BJP leader from Udupi. "He was with us for 30 years, but he was sent out as he developed electoral ambitions and we found out that his group was collecting hafta. In fact, the Congress funded him during the last assembly polls to divide the BJP vote." The CM said much the same to the media: "The Sri Rama Sene has nothing do with the Sangh parivar, I am telling you honestly."

Humbled? Pramod Mutalik being produced in Belgaum

Mutalik, who began as an RSS and VHP worker and was loaned to the Bajrang Dal, quit it four years ago to float his own outfit which was aligned first with the Shiv Sena and then with Uma Bharati’s breakaway faction. His basic loyalties, though, still lie with the BJP. Prior to his arrest on January 27, he said: "The Congress is trying to exploit the situation and wants to bring a bad name to the BJP government."

The fact that Mutalik enjoys Sangh and BJP support is evident. In August 2007, when Yediyurappa was deputy CM in the H.D. Kumaraswamy cabinet, as many as 51 cases were withdrawn against parivar men, including Mutalik. The government’s internal correspondence, accessed by Outlook, said: "The government has decided to withdraw the 51 cases...filed against Bajrang Dal activists in Haveri, Shimoga, Belgaum, Gadag, Bijapur, Mandya, Bagalkot, Kodagu, Dharwad, Uttara Kannada and Dakshina Kannada districts".

Mutalik is the first accused in many of these cases while VHP leader Praveen Togadia figures prominently in others.

The firs give a detailed account of how Mutalik, Togadia and their associates made incendiary speeches against Muslims. Some cases even have video proof. Sources in the government say the cases were withdrawn despite "stiff resistance" from the legal department and the police. Incidentally, Mutalik has also been linked to Malegaon blast accused Prasad Purohit. Maharashtra ATS officials left for Mangalore on January 29 to investigate whether Mutalik was aware of and/or involved in the blasts conspiracy. Sources, though, say that current evidence shows that Mutalik had just earned praise from Purohit, who nursed the grandiose ambition of creating a Hindu rashtra through an alignment of all radical Hindu groups across the country and sympathetic governments abroad. Meanwhile, less than a month ago, the Yediyurappa government decided to withdraw many cases against parivar activists in the Baba Budangiri/Datta Peeta controversy in Chikmagalur.
"A political colour is being given to the attacks. The so-called secularists suffer from a BJP-RSS phobia." Rajnath Singh, BJP National President	Which begs the question: if the parivar was indeed estranged from Mutalik and his outfit, why did the BJP government generously withdraw cases against him? Also, if the government was serious about containing communal violence, especially in a sensitive milieu following the church attacks, what signal was it sending by withdrawing the cases? Wouldn’t it embolden the parivar outfits? The police now say that it will book the Sri

Rama Sene activists under the Goonda act and is also planning to invoke the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, but what is the guarantee that they will not be forced to withdraw them after public fury has abated? Also, even if one completely discounts the Mangalore pub incident as "trivial" as the BJP government wants us to believe, it still has a lot of answering to do considering the number of communal stirrings (See here) that the state has witnessed, especially in the coastal districts, after the BJP came to power last May. As they say, the pub incident is only its tip, the iceberg of communal hate as engineered by the parivar on the coast has a chilling history of at least a decade. This is, in fact, causing some to wonder if coastal Karnataka is en route to becoming the Gujarat of the South and turned a ‘Hindutva laboratory’. In the past decade, communal violence in the Mangalore and Udupi districts has chiefly centred around three issues: cattle slaughter, elopement and eve-teasing. Cow slaughter, in fact, triggered riots in October 2006 when the JD(S)-BJP government was in power. The parivar had taken its cow protection programme so seriously that, prior to the riots, a gang of Bajrang Dal activists had not spared even a Brahmin priest in Udupi district for mediating the sale of cows. Similarly, the Hindu Yuva Sena has pressured gram panchayats to cancel licences of Muslim butchers who sell beef. In March 2005, the outfit paraded naked a Muslim father and son in Adi Udupi in front of 500-600 people for allegedly "illegally trading in cows". However, the most common reason by far for a communal flare-up relates to the ‘mingling’ of youngsters from different communities. G. Rajashekar, co-author of The Dark Faces of Communalism, a book on communalism in Karnataka, says that according to data he has collected between May 2008 and now, there have been "14 recorded incidents of violence against Hindu girls for having been seen with either a Muslim or a Christian boy". Prof Phaniraj, a rights activist teaching at a Manipal engineering college, says: "Since 1998, the frequency of communal incidents in the Dakshina Kannada area has increased.

Between 1998 and 2000, communal incidents were reported every six months, every month between 2000 and 2004, and from 2004 on, we find that incidents occur every week." The invariable plot for violence, he adds, is about a boy from a Muslim or Christian community ‘found being friendly’ with a Hindu girl, which leads to the self-styled protectors of the Hindu faith ‘intervening’ to ‘free’ the girl. Except intervening here means thrashing the boy. "We should remember that there was a sustained campaign against the Muslim community in Gujarat before Godhra happened," says Phaniraj. Just prior to the Surathkal riots in 1998, a lot of pamphlets warning young Hindu women against going with Muslim boys were circulated.
"There is a state of utter and complete lawlessness in Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Bellary." H.D. Kumaraswamy Janata Dal (S) President	"One of them asked Hindu women to be cautious of Muslim men in footwear shops." In fact, you would indeed think the Mangalore pub incident to be ‘trivial’ compared to earlier incidents in the region (See here) were it not for the staged replays of the event,

courtesy a local TV channel. On the very same day, Bajrang Dal men had barged into a private party and assaulted those present. And the man who instigated the pub attack, Prasad Attavar, had in 2007 assaulted a Muslim boy at the Ideal Ice-cream Parlour in the heart of Mangalore for talking to a Hindu girl. More ghastly, however, was the 2005 incident in a Puttur cinema when two men (one Muslim) and two Hindu women working in an areca processing factory had gone to see a movie. Around 150 Bajrang Dal activists barged in, dragged the four out and assaulted them before handing them over to the police. As recently as six months ago, a Muslim and Hindu couple living together were forced to return to their native Gadag by parivar activists. "Intrusion into private spaces has become common," says Phaniraj. The girls who were assaulted by Mutalik’s Sena Rajashekar rues that even people have become insensitive. "The pub incident is not a one-off criminal act as the CM and home minister are trying to project," he says. "It is part of a political programme. The fact that TV cameras were in position before the incident took place reminds me of the Walter Benjamin observation that ‘Fascism makes a spectacle of its ideology’. People are not shocked by what has happened. They simply watched it like any TV serial." Father Prashant Madtha, former principal of St Aloysius College, Mangalore, attributes the frequent eruptions in the city to a clash of cultures. "Because of the various educational institutions in the area, Mangalore has witnessed an influx of people from across India. The locals feel threatened by the outsiders and feverishly protect their culture from corruption." Amidst all this are fears that the constabulary too has been communalised. But state DG and IG of police, R. Srikumar, dismisses the idea outright. "It is easy for people to pass value judgements," he says. "Let those who accuse us give us in writing the names of officers who have acted communally and we’ll investigate the charges." The other worry is the media. "The local media here has coopted the language of the parivar," rues Phaniraj. "So, the common man has started accepting propaganda without questioning it." The general attitude of the Sangh to media non-compliance was evident in the case of B.V. Seetharam, the editor of the Mangalore-based newspaper Karavali Ale and a Sangh critic. Handcuffed and arrested in an alleged extortion case on January 6, he is still in prison. The quality of public discourse too seems to have reached a nadir ever since the BJP has come to power.There seems to be no middle path. Following the church attacks, a mainstream Kannada newspaper ran a poisoned debate on the issue of conversions for over a month. The right-wing historian and novelist S.L. Bhyrappa, who opened the debate, claimed that "there was an alarming increase in conversions ever since Sonia Gandhi had come to power". He also endorsed a study which said that every day "5,000 people in India were converting to Christianity". Besides the coastal districts, there has been an uneasy calm at other flashpoints like Baba Budangiri since 2004, where the Sangh parivar is hell-bent on converting the Sufi shrine with a rich tradition of religious syncretism into an exclusive Hindu pilgrimage centre. BJP leader H.N. Ananth Kumar had vowed to make it the ‘Ayodhya of Karnataka’. The Hubli Idgah Maidan issue had cropped up temporarily in September 2004 when Uma Bharati courted arrest and lost her chief ministership, but there has been little noise since then. The silence is eerie, however, and with a BJP government in power, pregnant.