Bengaluru: Congress leader Siddaramaiah’s recent remark on Karnataka chief minister Basavaraj Bommai’s alleged corrupt tenure and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s response to it is an apt instance of the strategic electoral significance that the Lingayats enjoy in Karnataka. Answering a question about the possibility of a Lingayat face as the next chief minister, the Congress veteran sought to dismiss caste affiliations of a political leader and said that the “root of all corruption in the state” is a “Lingayat CM” currently. The tactless remark was blown up by the saffron party as an affront to the entire Lingayat community, with the mainstream media playing it up dutifully.
Siddaramaiah quickly issued a rebuttal, alleging that the BJP “twisted and misinterpreted” his statement when all he did was comment on corruption scandals under Bommai. “There have been very honest Lingayat chief ministers. There was S. Nijalingappa, Virendra Patil and others for whom I have a lot of respect as they were very honest chief ministers,” he added.
Siddaramaiah and other Congress leaders at a rally in Belagavi district. Photo: Twitter/siddaramaiah
Although a few leaks of a caste count done during Siddarmaiah’s chief ministerial tenure indicated that the Lingayats accounted for not more than 12% of the state’s population, unofficial estimates have always pegged the community count as anywhere between 15-17%. However, the community has had a disproportionate share in power ever since Karnataka’s formation in 1956. The community has been represented by powerful leaders and chief ministers and has emerged as one of the most resourceful groups in Karnataka.
Given the fact that the community is particularly dominant in central and northwest Karnataka, it has held sway over almost 50% of the assembly constituencies in the state. As a result, Lingayat leaders are also numerically the strongest in the assembly. Over the last few decades, the community has backed the BJP wholeheartedly under the leadership of B.S. Yediyurappa and has emerged as the single most important reason for the BJP’s expansion in the state.
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Understanding Lingayat support to BJP
However, the community has leaned towards the saffron party, not because of an inclination to Hindutva. Lingayat leaders see the BJP as an alternative to the Congress, which they think hasn’t given the community its due representation and respect.
Congress, which has had stalwart leaders like S. Nijalingappa, Veerendra Patil and others who were Lingayats, has had a love-hate relationship with the community. The 1969 split in the Congress that led to the formation of the Congress (Organisation) or the Syndicate was steered by Congress veteran Nijalingappa, a Lingayat leader from Karnataka. To counter his hold in Karnataka, D. Devaraj Urs of the Indira Gandhi-led Congress (Requisitionists) chalked out a new electoral combination that later came to be known as the Ahinda – a Kannada acronym for backward classes, Dalits, and minorities.
The coming together of these groups challenged the caste hegemony of dominant and ‘upper’ caste groups and devised a larger social justice narrative for the Congress. Urs went on to become the state’s chief minister twice, while Nijalingappa faded into political oblivion. The course of events distanced the Lingayats from the Congress for the first time.
The Congress attempted to make up for its losses by nominating Lingayat leaders like S. Bommai and Veerendra Patil and Ramakrishna Hegde, who although a Brahmin enjoyed considerable popularity among Lingayats, as chief ministers in the subsequent years.
But the real rift between the Lingayats and the Congress came in 1989, when Patil was unceremoniously removed from the chief minister’s office by the then Rajiv Gandhi-led government at the Centre within one year of his tenure. Patil had got his second term as the chief minister, 18 years after he served in the same office from 1968 to 1971. Rajiv is said to have announced from the Bangalore airport that the state will get a new chief minister without even informing Patil. The latter was in the middle of a controversy over the imposition of prohibition in the state. The Congress high command soon replaced him, after a brief period of President’s Rule, with S. Bangarappa who belonged to the Ediga community, who are traditionallly toddy-tappers.
The Congress high command’s move was seen as an insult and humiliation by the Lingayat community. Since then, a majority of the community has looked outside the Congress to seek representation. In the early 1990s, the community backed the Janata Dal. Following its split into Janata Dal (Secular) and Janata Dal (United), the community chose the latter as it was led by Ramakrishna Hegde and the Lingayat leader J.H. Patel. The latter became the chief minister of Karnataka while Hegde joined the A.B. Vajpayee government as the Union commerce minister in 1998-99.
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The Lingayats’ real relationship with the BJP began during the late 1990s, when the saffron party was in an alliance with the JD(U). When Patel died in 2000 and Hegde passed on in 2004, the leadership vacuum within the Lingayat community was filled by none other than BJP leader Yediyurappa. Since then, the community has backed Yediyurappa, and by default the BJP.
BS Yediyurappa at a Vijay Sankalp Yatra of the BJP. Photo: Twitter/@BSYBJP
A double-edged sword?
Yediyurappa has proven to be a double-edged sword for the BJP. While he is the primary factor behind the saffron party’s expansion across Karnataka, he has also been the sole reason that the Hindutva hasn’t had greater appeal among Kannadigas. Cast in the socialist mould, Yediyurappa has always kept an arm’s distance from any kind of Hindu nationalist politics, choosing to be seen as a welfarist and social justice-driven political leader. Such political posturing has helped him have a wider appeal among a range of communities with conflicting interests, even though he is perceived as a Lingayat leader first. His recent statement that he did not believe in communal politics and would rather have Hindus and Muslims living like brothers is a case in point.
Things changed for him with the Narendra Modi-led BJP coming to power at the Centre. With its aggressive push towards Hindu nationalist politics, Yediyurappa was becoming a thorn in its side. In order to curtail his influence in the Karnataka BJP, the Modi-led BJP appointed B.L. Santosh and Prahlad Joshi to rejig the party. The duo pushed hardline Hindutva and empowered leaders like C.T Ravi, Nalin Kumar Kateel, Anant Kumar Hegde, and Tejasvi Surya, much to the dislike of Yediyurappa and even incumbent chief minister Bommai, who too was trained in Yediyurappa’s ways.
The controversies over hijab, halal and the spread of Hindu-Muslim clashes outside coastal Karnataka, where Hindutva issues have had a historical presence, were attempts by the newly-empowered group led by Santosh to oust the old guard and take control of the party. Bommai’s last-minute attempt to remove the 4% Muslim quota only indicates that the Santosh-led group has become truly powerful within the party.
B.L. Santosh. Photo: Twitter/@blsanthosh
However, despite multiple attempts to sideline Yediyurappa by removing him as the chief minister or playing down his role, such is his influence over the Lingayat community – the core of the saffron party’s vote base – that the BJP has been forced to present him as the top leader whenever elections are around the corner. When he was brought back to steer the campaign in January again in the run-up to the 2023 assembly elections, the move hardly came as a surprise. This move also shows that Lingayats are swayed more by the politics of representation than Hindutva of any form.
The decision to put Yediyurappa at the top is forced but electorally sound. In 2012, when Yediyurappa exited from the party out of anguish against a similar attempt to sideline him and formed his own Karnataka Janata Paksha (KJP), the BJP was washed out, finishing with a mere 40 seats while the Congress secured a majority with 122 seats. The KJP won only six seats but got nearly 10% of the vote, which most likely came from the BJP’s traditional voter base comprising the Lingayats. The same election also saw BJP’s B. Sriramulu forming the Badavara Shramikara Raitara Congress (BRSC), which weaned away nearly 3% votes from the BJP’s bag and got four seats. Sriramulu is the most popular leader of the Nayakas, a Scheduled Tribe community that has been supporting the BJP over the past two decades.
The importance of caste and community alliances
The BJP has clearly understood the significance of pre-electoral caste and community alliances to remain in contention since then. The exit of high-profile Lingayat leaders Jagdish Shettar and Laxman Savadi, who blamed Santosh and his acolytes for humiliating senior leaders, has only made the BJP more anxious. The sidelining of Yediyurappa first, and his son B.Y. Vijayendra getting a ticket after a considerable struggle with Santosh’s group, and now the exit of Shettar and Savadi doesn’t make for good optics for the BJP, especially among the Lingayats.
Against such a backdrop, the Congress is depending heavily on weakening the Lingayat support for the BJP to increase its strike rate in central and northwest Karnataka. Its vote share has consistently been more than the BJP’s but that doesn’t translate into a greater number of seats for the grand old party. The Lingayat support in dense pockets of the state has delivered the BJP’s electoral victories in the past, although the party has negligible influence in south Karnataka where the contest is primarily between the H.D. Deve Gowda-led Janata Dal (Secular) and the Congress.
Precisely because of such factors, the BJP has almost abandoned its Hindutva issues for the moment and gone back to the safety net of the age-old caste and community-driven politics. In a series of interviews, Bommai has categorically been saying that hijab and halal issues are of no material in the upcoming elections. At the same time, Union home minister Amit Shah has been reminding the audience in his rallies that the BJP has replaced old Lingayat leaders with new faces from the Lingayat community itself, and not from any other caste group.
The organised attack by the BJP on Siddaramaiah’s remark is a clear reflection of such tactical posturing. The former Congress chief minister’s remark has also given a window to the BJP for raking up the Congress’s past mistakes while dealing with the Lingayats. In this pitched battle between political parties, however, the politics of social representation has clearly trumped the Hindutva pitch that the Santosh camp in the saffron party tried to advance with great belligerence.
