The anti-conversion Bill in Karnataka kicked up a storm of arguments in the last fortnight. The Bill was passed in the Legislative Assembly days before Christmas but is yet to get passage in the Legislative Council. Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai brought this Bill in such a tearing hurry that it seemed he was only covering up his lack of electoral appeal and administrative inefficiency. Not to mention the other dark clouds gathering over his government. The local media has constantly highlighted the mercenary attitude of the system he heads.
When a leader cannot use the tools of reason to engage and persuade, when he has no patience or regard for democratic methods, he takes out creamy cupcakes of emotion and breadsticks of sophistry to serve people. Bommai, who is without a proper mandate on the chief minister’s chair, has done just that. He is accused of serving his ideological benefactors, who judge his every step and remind him at every bend that he grew up in an alien political yard—meaning, his father was schooled in a different tradition and he carries his name. It is this memory that is held to ransom and placed next to the largesse of power they have bestowed on him. Is his faithfulness to that memory or to power? That is a question that perhaps swirled around some time ago, but with the anti-conversion Bill, he has confirmed his choice. There is no longer a dilemma.
I will not get into the legal provisions of the Bill and its constitutional validity. People opposing it have pointed out the fate of a similar law in the courts of Gujarat and Rajasthan. What I would like to instead chase is the intent and ironies involved in this entire exercise. First about intent: It should be clear to us by now that extreme right-wing projects, conceived without necessary statistical and circumstantial evidence, are flaunted essentially to establish intent and infiltrate the emotional space. They are not really worried about what will happen in a court of law. They may even be certain about the legal trajectory it may take. They will still pursue it because the idea gets a grand platform and allows their intent to take root, but more importantly, helps drive home the point that the Constitution is actually not aligned to their purpose, the majoritarian intent. This helps them seek louder voices against the Constitution as we have witnessed recently in Haridwar and elsewhere. They keep pushing their envelope of provocation and unreason.
The opposition parties that react to legislative pushes such as the anti-conversion Bill speak and act with little conviction and zero moral outrage. The liabilities they may accrue in an electoral ring always weigh heavily on them. In the case of Karnataka, the opposition Congress was thunderstruck in the Assembly when the Bill was tabled. The BJP threw a surprise. It said the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government had actually got the Bill drafted in 2016 and the chief minister himself had asked for it to be placed before the Cabinet. The fact that the Congress draft did not go further at the time and its Bill was not as stringent as the BJP’s does not matter. What matters is that the Congress saw a need to get an anti-conversion Bill drafted in the first place. It was again about intent, and they stood exposed. The BJP has learnt to play the intent game better and it often uses the Congress’ doublespeak to power it further.
Coming to ironies, the anti-conversion Bill actually strikes at the philosophical roots of the BJP’s largest support base. The Lingayats have been with the BJP for over two decades now and it is a community that was formed out of large-scale conversions in the 12th century to overcome caste indignities and establish a very humane order. The revolutionary acts of mystic and social reformer Basaveshwara, like a precious string of pearls, have become the heritage and history of Karnataka.
To this day, the Lingayat community, through its seminaries that number a few hundred in Karnataka, serve people through charities of education and food. Now, if these charities are sought to be looked at suspiciously, in a manner the Christian or Muslim communities are viewed, then it also criminalises the intent of the Lingayat seminaries. The Bill, when it becomes law, can be applied blindly. Liberal activists and the media who have spoken about this Bill discriminating against religious minorities, Dalits, tribals and women have not highlighted what it may do to the largest social reform movement in the state. They do not realise that there is scope to construct progressive politics around this community, which is also politically very powerful.
The irony of ironies is that Chief Minister Bommai himself is a Lingayat, and his name ‘Basavaraj’ is inspired by Basaveshwara himself. His ideological benefactors in the BJP may be cleverly using him as an instrument to alter the support character of the party. From being a party dominated by Lingayats, as it was under B S Yediyurappa and still so, they may be working to make it a pan-Karnataka party with a deeper Hindutva agenda. Yediyurappa, the biggest political mascot of the BJP in the state, should have seen through this game and stood up against it, but he callowly submitted and argued for the passage of the anti-conversion Bill.
The BJP knows that it will lose the next election under Bommai or whoever else may replace him (if the rumours are to be believed), so this is a long-term move of the party to shed its caste saffron and smear itself with that of religion. Yediyurappa was a politician who operated on the Mandal principle and the ‘kamandal’ was only incidental to him. The party wants that memory to be put away now. If one goes by this logic, then the next chief minister of Karnataka that the BJP will sponsor will be a non-Lingayat. Therefore, the intent and ironies may all be deliberate.
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior journalist and author
(sugata@sugataraju.in)