Conventional wisdom is that a crisis should never be wasted. It should be seen as an opportunity to reform. After the pontiff of one of the biggest seminaries in Karnataka was arrested on charges of sexual misconduct with minors, the focus is on the opaque world of caste seminaries in the state and the enormous power they wield. Perhaps it is time to restore the balance.
Even as harassed girls lodged a complaint and public outrage became instantly evident, top politicians, otherwise quick to tweet via their social media assassins, swore by a code of silence. Moral compunction is not something one easily associates with politicians, but in this case, it was a kind of omerta of the political class in Karnataka. They were not just weighing their words but were coldly counting votes. Caste seminaries are known to arrange favourable or destructive winds of support for a political party or a candidate in their ilakhas of influence, and assembly polls are only a few months away.
Amongst all top politicians, former chief minister B S Yediyurappa was an exception. He spoke but to put up a blind defence of the pontiff’s innocence and character. The investigation had not even begun. The BJP parliamentary board member had no qualms because he thought it was his primary duty to defend a pontiff who belonged to his community. He was neither compelled by the law nor bridled by a constitutional sense.
Caste identity politics has been excessively central to electoral fortunes in Karnataka and has almost held democracy to ransom. Even before the Mandal revolution altered the power game in the rest of India, Devaraj Urs, in the 1970s, mobilised backward castes to checkmate the two dominant communities in Karnataka—Lingayats and Vokkaligas. What Urs did was pure political engineering, but B S Yediyurappa, since the new millennium, added a whole new dimension to the caste business. He used caste saffron as a shortcut to capture the votes of backward class communities. That is, he unabashedly empowered caste seminaries to do the bidding of politicians and political parties.
Lingayats were already organised. Their seminaries had been around for centuries and were autonomous and distant from the upper caste Hindu and Vedic traditions. The Vokkaligas were imitating the Lingayats in the later parts of the twentieth century. But Yediyurappa, to build a wider base for himself and the BJP, incentivised the backwards and the oppressed to expeditiously organise themselves via caste seminaries.
As a chief minister, Yediyurappa was unbridled with grants and funds to these caste seminaries. He improved their access to the corridors of power, and this considerably weakened the democratic foundations and political traditions of Karnataka. He chose to promote caste saffron over the saffron of religion, which was on his party’s official agenda. By doing so, Yediyurappa had turned Urs’ experiment on its head and turned himself into a Mandal politician with a Hindutva air cover.
Within a short time, caste seminaries started acting as parallel power centres. That their spiritual quotient was lacking was apparent. From demanding that a particular person be offered a ticket to contest polls to suggesting that the chief minister’s chair be reserved for their leader, these seminaries started speaking a language that was alarming.
The seamlessness of power between caste seminaries and political parties in Karnataka was illustrated starkly in May this year when a former BJP minister became a pontiff of the oil-tilling community. As a politician, he promoted the idea of a seminary for his community and arranged resources for it. Yediyurappa was, of course, present at the ostentatious ‘sainthood-crowning’ ceremony.
In recent years, it has become a norm for political dignitaries visiting the state to be chaperoned by local leaders to these caste seminaries and be photographed at the feet of the pontiffs. The classic separation between the ‘church and the state’ in a democracy has been destroyed in an altogether different way in Karnataka. In this experiment, the pontiff of the Murugha Math, now arrested on serious charges, has somewhat been Yediyurappa’s ally.
Seminary was an idea associated primarily with Brahmins and Lingayats in Karnataka. Depending on their geographical location and historical influence, the other communities, including the backwards, followed one of the two orders for spiritual guidance. The oppressed were any way out of this.
But in the early 2000s, the state witnessed a unique sociological phenomenon when Shivamurthy Sharanaru of the Murugha Rajendra Math facilitated the creation of autonomous seminaries for the backwards and the oppressed. He ordained sainthood to chosen individuals from these communities (barbers, washermen, gypsies, cobblers, etc.). He not only solemnised them into a spiritual role in the Lingayat tradition but, like a venture capitalist, gave them a few acres of land from the rich reserves of his seminary’s land bank. He perhaps imagined that these new seminaries and pontiffs would circle him in different orbits, and he could leverage that in the political sphere.
This experiment was initially seen as some empowerment of the backwards and the oppressed. Short-sighted ‘progressives’ read it as a counter to Sangh Parivar politics that was making the upper caste Vedic tradition aspirational for people at the bottom of the varna hierarchy. Although, in a parallel development, some other backward communities like salt-makers, goldsmiths, weavers, and forest dwellers were being steered into the Vedic fold. The Constitution speaks of correcting social and economic backwardness, but in Karnataka, spiritual backwardness had cleverly become a criterion too. This not only sharpened the caste divide but also institutionalised caste in a way that made democracy dysfunctional.
Now may be the time for Karnataka’s political parties and politicians to correct this imbalance and limit caste seminaries to their chosen spiritual goals and social service. When there is doubt and anger in the minds of the voting populace, the task becomes relatively easier. Even as the Murugha Math pontiff’s arrest and his reported crimes were sinking in, a backward caste pontiff hung himself to death. This is after women in a leaked audio spoke of his alleged non-spiritual interests. In recent years, nearly a dozen judges of the Karnataka High Court recused from hearing rape charges against another saffron-clad. What could their potential conflict of interest be? Before the political project to blend caste and religious saffron picks up steam, democracy’s soul needs urgent fixing.
Senior journalist and author