Bigotry is shaping ‘Nava’ Karnataka

Not a day has passed over the last two years when the determination to reduce the Muslim to “bare life” has not been announced. Having successfully reduced the Muslim presence in the legislature to seven MLAs (or 3 per cent, the same as the proportion of women in the House), assaults have been made on religious life and livelihoods. In his most recent call to “end the monopoly of Muslim fruit traders” in Karnataka, the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti’s Chandru Moger finds a novel solution to the unemployment crisis. From the exclusion of Muslim traders at temple jatres, a micro-economic aggression has been amplified by invoking the spectre of a “spitting jihad” — and the boycott is now well underway.

In any encounter, a Hindu can do no wrong, and the Muslims must always prove their innocence. Home Minister Araga Jnanendra’s public withdrawal of his accusation that a road rage death was caused by the victim’s refusal to speak Urdu succeeded, despite strenuous police denials — a CID probe has been announced by the chief minister. Muskan’s spirited response against her tormentors in college over the hijab issue has now been linked to an international conspiracy. Instead of investigating the murder of Harsha, a Bajrang Dal worker of Shivamogga, which even the minister in charge of the district had first declared was due to personal enmities that arose between those with whom he shared time in jail, the young man was made into a Hindutva “martyr”. Clearly, that was not enough. The 10 Muslims charged with his murder had to be persecuted under the UAPA as anti-national conspirators, making bail impossible.

Will Karnataka arguably become the first state in India where the hydra-headed “outfits” — as they are euphemistically called — rule the state? It would be a grave error to view these actions as the foreplay of elections. These organisations today wield direct, visible and undeniable power over elected representatives, while being assured of freedom from accountability. There is nothing shadowy or indirect about their campaigns. Every issue which has emerged of late — ranging from the question of hijab in classrooms, namaz in public places, azaan, the ban on Muslim traders at jatres — has been vigorously pursued to render Muslims invisible, a goal that the political establishment, the media and the police appear increasingly eager to meet.

Indeed, this is nothing short of a “harmonious” project for establishing Hindu Rashtra by the Bajrang Dal, the Sri Rama Sene, the VHP, and their parent outfit. What began with the passage of swingeing laws — relating to cow slaughter in 2020, the regularisation of unauthorised (read Hindu) religious structures on public property, or proposed changes to “conversion” laws in 2021 — has now turned into daily, state-approved assaults on the faith, beliefs, lives and livelihoods of Muslims. Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai’s response to every communal provocation (beginning with his “action/reaction” statement against Christians in Mangalore) is to restate his obedience to the men who rule the streets. He has even taken the unprecedented step of granting state compensation of Rs 25 lakh to the family of Harsha. He has, despite warnings by former Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa and MLA S R Vishwanath, declared his commitment to the neo-nation.

When the staff at two police stations — Kaup in Dakshin Kannada and Vijayapura in Bijapur — flaunted saffron clothing on Vijayadashami day in 2021, they went unpunished, in ironic contrast to the insistence on uniforms in classrooms. Reports are now emerging of police refusal to file a case against Chandru Moger, citing possible disturbance to communal harmony, though they move with harsh alacrity against those protesting these alarming and unchecked communal actions. They too have publicly declared their allegiance to the neo-nation.

The media crowned its ongoing service to the Hindu cause when it confronted Muslim students and teachers wearing hijab to educational institutions on camera, following the interim order of the high court in February 2022. Like the police, a section of the media systematically targets those who protest the deterioration of public peace and harmony. The judiciary has remained a timid presence, protecting the legislators and the administration from “disruptive” protests.

How did Karnataka succumb so quickly to this corrosive masculinity? In a state which had no history of “cow protection” or high decibel campaigns against “the abduction of women” comparable to the Indo-Gangetic belt from the 1920s, what led the Ram Sene’s Raichur unit to announce its “Love Kesari”? The RSS worked hard over the last 100 years to achieve its goal of polarising people on Karnataka’s west coast, home to economically successful Muslims and Christians. But what of the rest of Karnataka, where a mixture of fear and enthusiastic participation by the majority seems to have achieved the same effect? What accounts for the new and passionate righteousness in the language and gestures of the men, and some women, who participated in the harassment of Christian prayer groups last year, or willingly wore orange shawls in February this year?

Hindu Rashtra has become the sole visionary future for legions of young people. The giddy sense of psychic empowerment from staging this muscular, militant masculinity, compensates for the impotence arising from a gnawing awareness that education alone is no longer the guarantee of social mobility or indeed jobs. It arises from the impotence of conceding that Kannada’s rich heritage is today no more than exhausted cultural capital, given the popular demand for English, the growing acceptance of Hindi, and increasing state support for Sanskrit. The “outfits” performative violence is emboldened by the utter disarray among those social groups, and within those social movements — the Dalit Sangarsh Samiti, the farmers’ and the women’s movement – that had made Karnataka the site of novel social justice and development measures in the recent past. The brief flicker of a pushback by Dalit men wearing blue shawls in Chitradurga at the height of the hijab protests simply vanished. Karnataka’s network of socially progressive Lingayat mathas, which have functioned like alternative governments in their respective regions, have either preferred to retain their autonomy, and tacit support of Hindutva, or have openly supported the “outfits”. Political opposition in the state has also been silenced.

So the token halt on April 16 by the Karaga procession at the Tawakkul Mastan Dargah, during Bengaluru’s most important civic event that celebrates more than two centuries of shared religiosities, will be, like Kuvempu’s song-poem, no more than a haunting memory of better times. But even those memories are endangered today, as the men who make “Nava” Karnataka promise to scrub clean its complex past by putting “moral” science in its place.

The writer taught history at JNU