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HomePoliticsCongress’ soft Hindutva has no magic in communally polarised Mangalore

Congress’ soft Hindutva has no magic in communally polarised Mangalore

Congress candidate Mithun Rai is running a soft Hindutva campaign in the hope that it’s a good strategy to take on the BJP.

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Mangalore: Mithun Rai, the Congress candidate from Mangalore, recites the Hanuman Chalisa, dons saffron shawls, donates cows to the needy and his campaign literature has a saffron tint.

Rai is running a “soft Hindutva” campaign in the hope that it is a good strategy to take on the BJP.

But, reactions to his appeal to moderate Hindu voters range from ridicule and scorn to cautious hope and incorrigible optimism. Where deep saffron and deep green hold sway, there is little evidence that voters are accepting lighter shades.

“Why should soft Hindutva work in a constituency where the BJP has been winning hands down?” asks Monappa, a former Panchayat president at Kalladka, a town 32 km east of Mangalore. The town was made infamous by Prabhakar Bhat, a rabble-rouser of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and incidents of communal violence.

His colleague, BJP district spokesman Harikrishna Bantwal, dismisses Rai’s hope of playing the soft Hindutva card to woo voters and defeat incumbent MP Nalin Kumar Kateel as a “pipe dream.”

Responding to his rival Kateel’s criticism of his soft Hindutva line, Rai said: “I don’t have to learn anything about Hindutva from Kateel. Real Hindutva is about taking all sections of the society, which is what I am doing.”

“My idea of Hindutva is to restrict my worship to my private space, and not use it for political ends,” Rai added.

It is not just the saffron camp that is dismissive of the Congress candidate’s strategic shift. Those who oppose the hardline Hindutva politics of the BJP are equally sceptical of this shift earning any dividends for the Congress.

“We don’t see the Congress going all out to attack the BJP on the Hindutva issue for fear of alienating the Hindus. Which is why even former chief minister Siddaramaiah, known for his tirades against the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is missing from the Congress campaign here,” says Muneer Katipalla, a CPI(M) leader.

Bava Padarangi, who runs a weekly tabloid from Kaikamba, a small town close to Mangalore’s Bajpe international airport, concurs: “It is foolish to expect the Hindu voters to fall for soft Hindutva in a district that is so hopelessly polarised on religious lines.”

On the defensive, the Congress is arguing that its candidate reciting devotional hymns need not offend the minorities. “Ours is Swami Vivekananda’s brand of Hindutva,” distrtict in-charge minister U.T. Khader said at a press conference.


Also read: Rahul Gandhi wants to win the south but Congress wants to divert funds to northern states


Communal violence

Coastal Karnataka from Karwar in the north to Mangalore in the south has travelled too far from the days of the Ayodhya movement. The 1991 Lok Sabha election saw Mangalore elect a BJP candidate for the first time. The party has won all successive parliamentary elections since then.

In these intervening years, hardcore Hindutva has struck firm roots in the district. Temples, mosques and churches abound in Mangalore and for a casual visitor the city presents a picture of communal harmony. But beneath the surface, the mutual antagonism and distrust are as deep as a series of incidents of Hindu-Muslim violence over the years has proven.

Travel around in Mangalore or the district’s countryside, you will notice saffron buntings put up by Hindu organisations in several places. “These flags have significance beyond their overt purpose of publicity for an event or a celebration. These days you can see such buntings even at weddings. They are like markers of territory,” said Katipalla.

“In the past, one could only see saffron buntings but more recently Muslims are aping the Hindus in this assertion of identity by flaunting green flags,” he added.

In fact, a dispute over the tying of buntings was said to have led to the murder of a Bajrang Dal member, allegedly by activists of the Popular Front of India (PFI), a fundamentalist Muslim organisation, in Katipalla village in January 2018.

Entry of SDPI

The stridency of the RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal is today matched in good measure by the PFI. The entry of the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), which is alleged to have close links to the PFI, less than a decade ago has made the situation even more dangerous.

For a party that was born in 2010, the SDPI’s performance in the Lok Sabha election four years later was impressive. It won 27,254 votes, way higher than the CPI(M), an established national party, which could win only 9,394 votes. Since then, it has gone on to pick up a good number of seats in municipal elections in the district. The party’s state president Ilyas Mohammed Thumbay is in the fray for the Mangalore seat this time.

The SDPI’s determined bid to make further inroads into the traditional Congress base will have a reasonable impact electorally. But its impact on the already tense Hindu-Muslim relations in the district will be far greater as it gains political legitimacy.

The RSS and SDPI feed off each other in a way. For one to grow, the other also has to grow. For every action of one of the two sides, there has to be an equal and opposite reaction from the other side. That explains the never-ending spiral of communal incidents here in the last few years.

But far from arresting this slide into the seemingly irretrievable position of communal discord in the district, the Congress’ softer version of aggressive Hindutva can only be expected to push the Muslims more and more into the arms of the PFI and SDPI.

After the murder of a Bajrang Dal activist Rajesh Poojary in 2014 in Bantwal taluk, three innocent Muslim youths were arrested. Ironically, it was not the Congress which came to their rescue. It was the dogged effort of the CPI(M)that led to the acquittal of the youths.


Also read: Math done, now Congress-JD(S) has to pass chemistry test in Karnataka


Congress ceding ground

The growth of the PFI and SDPI has much to do with the perception among Muslims that the Congress has only been using them as a vote bank without doing anything to shield them against communal violence in the district.

“What has the Congress said and done as the opposition party in the district for the last 28 years? It only wears the mask of a secular party but it is not secular,” Thumbay, the SDPI’s candidate, has been stressing in public meetings.

Thumbay has said the SDPI would have withdrawn from the fray if the Congress had put up a Muslim or even a Congress candidate. “We even held discussions with the Congress in the matter but we didn’t get a positive response.”

Muslim leaders in the local Congress unit had also demanded that a member of their community be fielded this time given that Muslims constitute the second largest group after the Billawas in the constituency.

In the 2018 Assembly elections, the Congress lost seven out of the eight seats falling under the Dakshina Kannada Lok Sabha constituency despite the SDPI withdrawing its candidates. The BJP had branded the Congress a “Muslim party” because of its understanding with the SDPI.

The adoption of a soft Hindutva strategy by the Congress this time around is to shed its pro-Muslim image. But by not being religion-neutral and adopting a soft Hindutva line, the Congress is in danger of staying second best at the hustings for more elections to come.

Worse, the Congress is ceding space for rabid forces to gain ground and communalising the political space further. In a region blessed with abundant natural resources and an industrious population, Congress should have worked to keep extremist passions in check and focused energies on sustaining the impressive socio-economic indicators.

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