BENGALURU/MANDYA: The annual Hanuman Sankirtana Yatra, a routine religious procession, began on Wednesday under an unusually heavy security blanket, with rising communal unease in a district regarded as a model of Hindu-Muslim harmony.
The 4.2-km yatra, held for more than a decade, wound its way through Mandya town’s most sensitive stretches, including the Jamia Masjid in Srirangapatna. While the procession remained largely peaceful, some participants raised slogans, claiming the mosque stood at the site of a Hindu temple, allegedly altered during the era of Tipu Sultan.
Police personnel stationed along the entire route immediately intervened to prevent any escalation. Superintendent of Police Mallikarjun Baldandi told TNIE: “There was no serious tension. The procession crossed the mosque peacefully. We had deployed adequate forces at every junction, and the situation is under control.”
The precautionary deployment – unprecedented for this yatra – comes against a backdrop of simmering communal incidents across the district. In Keregodu village, the recent hoisting of a saffron flag on the official Gram Panchayat flagpost drew widespread condemnation for its overt majoritarian symbolism on a government structure. Earlier this year, clashes during the Ganesha Chaturthi processions in Nagamangala and Maddur shattered Mandya’s record of peaceful communal coexistence.
The ruling Congress and political observers allege that these flashpoints are part of a coordinated attempt by the BJP-RSS to communalise Old Mysore region, where the party has historically struggled to gain a foothold. In several assembly segments here, BJP candidates have routinely polled below 10 per cent and forfeited their deposits, making the sudden surge in Hindutva mobilisation politically significant.
Former minister and ex-BJP state vice-president B Somashekar, who joined the Congress ahead of the 2023 polls, said, “This is a naked, calculated attempt to communalise Mandya and the entire Vokkaliga heartland. The people of this region have lived in harmony for generations, what Kuvempu calls ‘Shantiya Thota’. Deliberate provocation of this kind must be stopped before irreversible damage occurs.”
Despite the peaceful completion of the Sankirtana Yatra, local Congress leaders and Vokkaliga representatives warn that repeated attempts to “saffronise” public spaces -- whether through processions or symbolic acts like the Hanuman Sankirtan Yatra -- are creating unease in a community that has historically rejected communal politics. Political observers, however, fear the region may be headed into what some describe as “a manufactured season of unrest”, with the Sankirtana Yatra emerging as both a flashpoint and warning sign of what may follow.