Godhra To Mangalore
The Sangh parivar and the BJP play the communal
card in Karnataka:
* Liberating the shrine of Sufi saint Baba
Budangiri in Chikmagalur and converting it into
a place of Hindu pilgrimage is the main plank.
The shrine has been billed as the "Ayodhya
of the south".
* Campaign launched to project Tipu Sultan as
anti-Kannada, anti-Hindu
* The Ramjanmabhoomi issue has been revived
successfully in Dakshina Kannada district
* There is a sustained campaign that coastal
Karnataka is infested with Muslim terrorists
* Effort on to communalise the constabulary
in coastal Karnataka
* 'Proactive' cow protection and moral policing
on in sensitive districts
A few years ago, BJP leaders liked to refer
to Karnataka as the party's gateway to the south.
Today, with the saffron party in alliance
with the JD(S) in power, there is a buzz in
the BJP in Bangalore-that the state, like Gujarat,
is the Sangh parivar's new laboratory in the
south. And for those waiting for a Hindutva
surge in Karnataka, December 6 may well turn
out to be a red letter day. It is on that day
that the 'prestige' bypoll in Chamundeshwari,
where JD(S) and BJP have fielded a joint candidate
against S. Siddaramaiah of the Congress, will
be decided. It is believed that victory or defeat
in this poll will prove crucial for the ruling
coalition. If the BJP combine wins, it will
be a shot in the arm for the parivar. Other
than being the 14th anniversary of the 'fall'
of the Babri Masjid, December 6 is also the
day when the Datta Jayanti celebrations will
get under way at the shrine of Sufi saint Baba
Budangiri in Chikmagalur district, an event
that has been a source of communal tension.
The BJP and the Sangh's declared objective
is to instal an idol of Dattatreya, a local
Hindu deity, appoint their own priest and conduct
Vedic rites and prayers. The Baba Budangiri
shrine has always been a place where both the
Sufi saint and Dattatreya are worshipped by
both Hindus and Muslims. The Sangh parivar now
wants to claim the whole shrine and keep the
Muslims out.
The communal riots in Mangalore in October were
a rude reminder
The Sangh parivar in Karnataka has been preparing
for December 6. The Mangalore communal violence
in October, in which two Muslims were killed,
is spoken of as a 'big message' to the Muslim
community in the state. When Mangalore was burning,
BJP minister Nagaraj Shetty, in charge of the
district, reiterated how much he idolised Narendra
Modi. Yatras by BJP leaders in the Malnad region,
western Karnataka, over the last few months
have been done with the purpose of "liberating"
Baba Budangiri shrine. In 1999, former Union
minister H.N. Ananth Kumar had sworn that the
shrine would be the Ayodhya of Karnataka. This
time around, with the BJP in power in the state,
the parivar feels it is within striking distance.
In October, a revered icon in Karnataka, Tipu
Sultan, became the target of the Sangh parivar
after the BJP education minister, D.H. Shankara
Murthy, painted him as an 'anti-Hindu' and 'anti-Kannada'
ruler. These statements had come without any
provocation, but the print space it consumed
in the Kannada press was unprecedented. And
the Ram mandir issue has been successfully revived
in the communally sensitive Udipi and Dakshina
Kannada districts where roadside meetings in
towns and villages, sponsored by the Rama Mandira
Nirmana Samarthana Samithi, happen almost everyday.
"Nothing explosive may happen on December
6, but the very build-up and the hate campaign
that we see in every corner of coastal Karnataka
and in parts of Malnad is a well-planned strategy
to intimidate the minorities," says Anand
Kodimbala, a Mangalore college lecturer.
Such a meeting witnessed by this correspondent
right outside the deputy commissioner's office
in Mangalore on November 27 went like this:
It is 4 pm in the evening, children are coming
out of three Christian convents down the road
(St Ann's, Carmel and Rosario). In the crowd,
there are young girls with hijabs (the city
has nearly 40 per cent Muslims) and nuns (20-25
per cent are Christians). In the vicinity there
is also a dargah. There are more than 50 Mahindra
jeeps with saffron flags parked. Traffic has
been blocked. About a thousand people are squatting
on the road listening to some astonishing demagoguery
by pontiffs of local Hindu maths, including
the influential Pejawar Vishvesha Teertha Swamiji.
The speeches are, among other things, about
their '92 kar seva experience when Babri Masjid
fell; the Upanishadic shlokas "found on
the bricks" that came falling; Mohammed
Afzal's hanging and how they would worship the
judge who sentenced him as "Mahatma";
how the dome of the Babri Masjid appeared like
the bald pate of then PM, P.V. Narasimha Rao
etc. Surprisingly, there is no mention of Sonia
Gandhi.
When Outlook asked Mangalore SP B. Dayanand
why permission was granted for such a provocative
meeting, he pleaded helplessness. "We denied
permission for a protest procession. This meeting
was only meant to give a memorandum to the DC
and therefore we allowed it. We can't stop all
meetings, we can only regulate them. We are
actually in a Catch 22 situation-if we do not
allow these meetings they will take a violent
shape," says Dayanand. Almost all MLAs
and MPs in coastal Karnataka are from the BJP.
D.V. Sadananda Gowda, the state BJP chief, is
Mangalore's MP.
An inflammatory Sangh parivar rally in Mangalore
in front of the DM's office
Dakshina Kannada district, in which Mangalore
falls, is representative of the communal tension
in Karnataka. It is feared that if the situation
is allowed to slip any further, it would be
the "Godhra of the south". The October
communal violence justifies the fear: it was
the first time in Karnataka that a constabulary
had been accused of being communal. A charge
that was treated casually by the state's home
minister, M.P. Prakash, who reportedly told
a human rights delegation that "you cannot
help the presence of such elements in the force".
But the stories going around of the Muslim
victims of the riots from Prof Phaniraj and
G. Rajashekar, who went round meeting victims
and are authors of a history of communal violence
in Dakshina Kannada, is disturbing. Hear this
one about a family in Ullal, on the outskirts
of Mangalore, where the police barged into and
allegedly "looted" a number of Muslim
homes: "The police did not even have the
names of people who they needed to arrest. It
is just that Muslims had to be rounded up,"
say Rajashekar and Phaniraj.
Like it happened in Gujarat, where there was
a sustained hate campaign against the Muslim
community for more than 15 years before Godhra
happened, Dakshina Kannada too has a history
of communal violence, which came to the fore
first during the riots in December 1998. "We,
the people of Udipi and Dakshina Kannada, tend
to boast of our accomplishments as highly literate
districts, as leaders in the banking and hotel
sectors. Now we have one more feather in our
caps: we are the districts with the highest
rate of violence against minorities, courtesy
the Sangh parivar. Simply put: there is one
such incident of violence almost every day,"
say Phaniraj and Rajashekar.
Additional district magistrate A.G.Bhat, who
agrees the situation in the district is volatile,
says: "There are three issues around which
clashes happen in the district-cattle slaughter,
elopement and eve-teasing, and religious conversions
and processions." On the day we were in
Udipi, there was a case of a Muslim boy being
beaten up by Sangh parivar activists for talking
to a Hindu girl who was his classmate.
Earlier, there have also been instances of
Bajrang Dal activists storming a movie theatre
in Puttur with the hope of catching young lovers
of different faiths "red-handed".
There have been attacks on youngsters taking
a stroll on the beach. There have also been
brutal murders for the crime of having fallen
in love with a person of another faith. "The
atmosphere is vitiated, my personal view is
that there is a feeling of insecurity among
Muslims here," says Bhat.
The cow-protection programme of the Sangh parivar
in the district is pursued so seriously that
in May 2006 a gang of 10 Bajrang Dal activists
assaulted a Brahmin priest in Udipi district,
for mediating the sale of cows. Similarly, the
Hindu Yuva Sena ensured the Nejaru village gram
panchayat cancelled the licence of Kasim Saheb
to sell beef. In Adi Udipi, a Muslim father
and son were paraded naked for trading in cows.
In conversion cases the attack is mostly on
the Protestant community.
Strangely, Opposition politicians are silent.
Senior Congress leaders like Margaret Alva,
Oscar Fernandes, Veerappa Moily and Janardhan
Poojary all hail from coastal Karnataka, but
they have been mum about the trauma of the minorities.
Even during the October riots, they were missing.
"The Congress leaders have forfeited the
political space to the Sangh parivar,"
says Rajashekar. When an alliance was forged
with the BJP in February 2006, CM H.D. Kumaraswamy
had said he was still searching for the meaning
of the word "secularism". One can
only hope that the communal situation in Dakshina
Kannada would offer him
some insight.
Outlook Magazine | Dec 11, 2006
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