Karnataka has been in the news in the past week for a sporadic ‘communal clash’ in Mandya district’s Maddur. The violence broke out after a few ‘miscreants’ threw stones at a Ganesh visarjan procession in Ram Rahim locality as it was passing by a local mosque on September 7 (Sunday). 

The youth in the procession retaliated and the situation spiralled into a ‘communal confrontation’ compelling the police to step in. 

Hindu activists and BJP workers quickly gathered at the site and were seen sporting saffron shawls and flags shortly after word of the clashes spread. The next day, a march was taken out from Ugra Narasimha Swamy Temple on Hale Pete Beedhi towards a government guest house. 

The demonstration was spearheaded by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) district president Dr Indresh and leaders of other Hindu activist organisations. According to a report, the protesters lit camphor and set tyres on fire on reaching the main mosque near Kemmannu Nale Circle. 

Former BJP MP Pratap Simha alleged that weapons and stones were stored inside the mosque and claimed that it was a ‘pre-planned’ attack on Hindus. BJP state president B.Y. Vijayendra alleged that since the Congress came to power in Karnataka, Hindus had been repeatedly insulted and Hindu sentiments hurt. 

Ashok, the leader of the opposition, provocatively asked “Is this a state in India or has it become a mini-Pakistan?”.  Janata Dal (Secular) MP H.D. Kumaraswamy held the ‘poor governance’ by the government as the reason for the stone-pelting and for leaving the Hindu community ‘dissatisfied’. 

The Hindu activists have called for a bandh along with the closure of the mosque in the area and immersion of Ganesha idols on Wednesday to boost the morale of the Hindu community in the region. 

Previous episodes of violence in Mandya

A similar incident occurred last year during a Ganesh Chaturthi procession in Nagamangala in Mandya district. The procession stopped for a long time near a local mosque, prompting a heated argument between members of the two communities. But what made matters worse was the pelting of stones at the procession, which iggered further violence, including setting ablaze shops owned by both Hindus and Muslims in the area. 

In January this year, another controversy erupted when officials removed a Lord Hanuman flag from a flagpole in Keragodu village in Mandya, replacing it with the Indian national flag. The Gram Panchayat had permitted only the national and Kannada flags to be hoisted but Hindutva activists insisted that the state government was ‘anti-Hindu’. In response to the rising communal tensions, the police imposed Section 144.    

Therefore, the clashes in Maddur today should not be seen as a stand-alone incident in Karnataka. These ‘episodes of violence’ can be seen as a sign of growing anti-Muslim anger in the Vokkaliga-dominated region. 

Two important questions also arise from these episodes. How is the politics of the state likely to shift in the coming decades with the arrival of Hindutva in the region? What does it tell us about the nature of the Hindutva movement as it leaves its footprints in a region which has been a difficult feat for it to overcome? 

BJP and the dynamics of local politics in Old Mysore region

Karnataka, owing to its turbulent political history, was one of the first southern states where the saffron party bloomed electorally, and became the ‘southern gateway’ of the BJP in the early 2000s. 

However, except for the coastal region of Karnataka, infamously known as the ‘Hindutva laboratory’, the BJP has found it harder to comfortably take over other regions of the state from its political rivals, Congress and JD(S), through communal pursuits alone. 

Each region in Karnataka has a different local dynamic that has made the BJP’s growth uneven in the state. In this regard, the Old Mysore region had always posed itself as a convincing outlier, being averse to intense communal stirrings and having a strong political alternative to the two National parties in the JD(S). 

The reasons for the region’s insular politics comes from a variety of politico-electoral and socio-economic factors. First, this region has been a stronghold of the JD(S), which has a sprawling grassroots network in the entire region. 

H.D. Devegowda and his family still garners huge respect and attention from the people in this region. The family acts as a conduit for the Vokkaliga to maintain and assert their dominance in the state politics against not only the Lingayats but also other OBCs and Dalits, formulated as AHINDA (a Kannada acronym for minorities, backward classes and Dalits).

Secondly, while the economic competition between Muslims and Hindus across castes has been a bone of communal contention in the coastal region, the same cannot be said for Old Mysore. Communities are fairly well-integrated without stark economic differences between Muslims and the Hindus. 

Third, the cultural memory of Tipu Sultan is that of a ‘benevolent ruler’, which makes people averse to Hindu right-wing’s crass depiction of him as a cruel Islamic ruler. The right has also tried to fan the caste sentiments of the Vokkaligas by making-up two new characters – Uri Gowda and Nanjegowda – who killed Tipu in their version of history. 

Lastly, the entire region has a relatively lower percentage of Muslim minority, especially Mandya, which has one of the lowest Muslim minority populations (less than 5%) in the entire state. 

The region has not seen many instances of communal violence before this decade. Thus, in a region which is dominated by an enthusiastic, meat-eating community of Vokkaligas – who have their own local deities and are particularly less religious than their Lingayat counterparts – the challenge to Hindu right-wing in this region is two-fold: political as well as socio-cultural. Over the past few years the BJP seems to have been playing its cards right, slowly and steadily. However, if the odds are stacked against the BJP, how is the party creating conditions for its fervent sprout in the region?   

Akin to most parts of Karnataka, the entire population in the Old Mysore belt is deeply conscious of its caste identity. As a matter of fact, most local conflicts pertain to the one between two caste communities in the region: the  dominant Vokkaligas and the Dalits.

Under such a circumstance, communal violence becomes significant for Hindutva mobilisation – for suppressing local caste conflicts and consolidating a Hindu base which transgress parochial identities of caste against the Muslim ‘other’. 

My contention here is that this singular causal factor does not adequately explain the less visible but incremental micro-shifts in the region prompted by the BJP as well as the ongoing changes in the caste dynamics independent of any political meddling.

It is truly provocative to think that despite a decade of engineering communal conflicts repeatedly and strategically with its ‘well-oiled machinery’ in multiple locations across the country, the BJP still faces a volatile electorate which demands the party to be sensitive to local caste arithmetics and attuned to its regional dynamics. 

It often fails in garnering support by merely communalising the electorate. This explains the BJP’s careful, contextual and pragmatic approach to ‘defusing’, adapting and/or accommodating conflicts arising out of regional politics. 

For instance, during the 2023 Karnataka state elections, the BJP’s campaign carried a shrill communal pitch around issues such as the hijab, halal, and Hanuman Chalisa, but the party later backtracked, claiming these were never electoral issues to begin with.

This comes from the party’s astuteness in responding quickly to the fact that Karnataka’s electorate did not resonate with the communal rhetoric and did not consider it while casting votes, especially in the Mandya region. 

This line of argumentation questions the inflated estimation of Hindutva’s omnipresence while simultaneously allowing one to think through the fault lines the movement faces. 

While the use of ‘communal conflicts’ or anti-Muslim violence are a part of Hindutva’s mobilising strategies, it is not all there is. There are layers of more than one local factor that the BJP craftily strings together under its ideological meta-narrative of Muslim conspiracy against the Hindu nation. 

Beneath the surface of ‘communal clashes’

Given the Old Mysore region’s socio-political ecosystem, the BJP’s communal callings do not directly inspire people. However, the party has benefitted from a major political advancement in the region. The results of the 2023 state elections prompted the party to forge a strategic alliance with regional player JD(S) to conquer the Vokkaliga-dominated area. The positive outcomes of this were seen in the Lok Sabha elections of 2024. 

However, this alliance is also signalling a shift in the state’s politics. Political analyst B.S. Murthy predicts that the biggest loss will be to the JDS, with its local cadre briskly aligning with the BJP. He says, “with JDS in disarray and leaders like H.D. Kumaraswamy away from home turf, their vote bank is now ripe for saffron consolidation”.

In the Old Mysore region, the Vokkaliga vote is largely split between Congress and the JD(S) with some votes for the BJP. With the BJP JD(S) alliance, the Muslims have shifted towards the Congress that some Vokkaligas see as a betrayal to the Gowda family. 

Moreover, it also allows the BJP to pander to the prevalent anti-Congress sentiment in the region more liberally by projecting it as a party that appeases the Muslim minority. Another reason for anti-Congress sentiment in the region comes majorly from the Congress’s turn towards the AHINDA that threatens the Vokkaliga dominance. 

Therefore, the community’s ‘communal gamble’ is concerned more with maintaining their caste hegemony rather than anti-Muslim sentiments per se. The proposition is that the ‘communal clashes’ in Mandya region ought to be read within this larger political context working in the background. What looks straightforward as anti-Muslim violence in Mandya is actually more complex. 

Though the anti-Congress sentiment among some Vokkaliga sections is not new, the BJP has reframed them in cultural-communal terms. Thus, opposing the Congress implicitly means opposing Muslims. This overlap lends a political opening for the BJP to mobilise Vokkaliga anger against the Congress and redirect it against Muslims – collapsing political rivalry into religious antagonism. 

What appears as a communal hostility must also be read as a reconfiguration of local caste politics through the discursive tools of Hindutva. This is visible in Vijayendra’s statement on the Maddur clashes alleging that the ‘Congress party is doing communal politics’ and its “anti-Hindu and pro-minority policies have led to the oppression of Hindus in Karnataka”.

Meanwhile R. Ashok, the leader of the opposition, blamed the “Tipu Gang inspired by CM Siddaramaiah” and the Congress government for activating the ‘toolkit of the fanatics’ as a part of its vote bank politics. Thus, what the BJP is doing is to turn existing anti-Congress resentment in the region into a communal script. 

The overt attempts by the BJP to ‘Hindutva-ise’ this region by furthering ‘communal clashes’ are not merely expressions of anti-Muslim sentiments. The explanatory urge is for the analysis of Hindutva’s interaction with local dynamics to go beyond the simplistic Hindu-Muslim binary. 

The ‘conscious decoupling’ of this binary facilitates one to understand how Hindutva relies on multiple strategies to mobilise across sections of the society and does not stop at anti-Muslim polarisation at a discursive level. 

This is a timely reminder that the BJP’s approach – particularly its electoral strategies – extend beyond mere Hindutva rhetoric. This fosters a perception that while the party outwardly champions a vision of ‘cultural nationalism’ based on Hindu identity, its actual political tactics are far more sophisticated and calculated. 

The triangular fight between JD(S), Congress and BJP has kept the state politics of Karnataka resilient and away from an unhealthy polarisation for decades. However, with the alliance between a declining JD(S) and a politically astute BJP against the Congress, the realignment of the caste-configurated political blocks is on the table. The instrumental use of riots and violence is likely to become a political staple in the region. BJP’s growth in Karnataka will permanently alter the politics of the state in a drastic manner, with a change in its tone and character.

Sanjana K. Sitaraman is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

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