“Who is Owaisi? He is Mohammad Ali Jinnah's new avatar. We must defeat him. Chief Minister of Telangana K. Chandrashekhar Rao wants to turn Hyderabad into Istanbul (capital of Turkey) - a 100 per cent Muslim country,” charged 30-year-old BJP MP Tejasvi Surya in Hyderabad on Tuesday as the old city is bracing for December 1 municipal polls.
The attack coming from a first-time MP from Bengaluru South has shocked and surprised many. It is not the BJP top brass targeting the veterans, but a political newbie, who is leading from the front, galvanising the youth in non-BJP ruled states, speaking about development and "communal politics" in the same breath.
On October 8, Surya had similarly attacked West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, calling her government "an apt example of a fascist regime".
Surya—a young, educated, tech savvy, fiery Hindutva poster boy—is the BJP's latest discovery to attract the youth in the non-BJP ruled states.
Surya's elevation as the chief of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) on September 26 came as no big surprise as he fit the bill as a Hindi-speaking south Indian, a Hindutva hardliner and a young leader eager to mobilise the youth for a saffron surge in the South.
A practising lawyer in the Karnataka High Court, Surya has had a dream run in politics so far. He was part of the BJP's digital communication team during the 2018 Assembly polls. A year later, he emerged as a surprise choice to fight the Bengaluru South Parliament seat in May 2019, following the demise of six-time sitting MP and Union minister H.N. Ananth Kumar. Most of the state leaders had hoped to see Tejaswini, wife of Ananth Kumar, contest. However, Surya’s candidature was defended by none other than B.L. Santosh, the national organisational secretary, who had said that BJP could not give tickets on the basis of "genes and DNA". To bring all the disgruntled leaders on the same page, even Union home minister Amit Shah had campaigned for Surya in a road show. Surya, who belongs to the Brahmin community, won the poll with a huge margin of 3.31 lakh votes.
In January 2020, Amit Shah once again surprised the state leaders when he readily inaugurated Surya's new office in Bengaluru. The blue eyed boy of the former party chef gifted him a flattering portrait, where Shah shared the frame with Sardar Patel, the architect of united India. It was also the time when Shah was being hailed in the BJP circles for pulling off the contentious abrogation of Article 370.
While the BJP cadres are enthused by the recent nominations of ordinary party workers to the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Councils, Surya hammers in the point that "BJP is the party of the karyakarta" and calls out the "political dynasts". It is interesting to note that his critics have often reminded him that his paternal uncle Ravi Subramanya, too, is a BJP MLA (from Basavanagudi). But Surya, whose father is a retired bureaucrat and mother a teacher, vehemently denies being a dynast. The Chikkamagaluru lad, who was raised in Bengaluru, has been a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishat and the BJYM, and attended RSS shakha and worked as BJP spokesperson before he was handpicked to contest from Bengaluru South against Congress leader B.K. Hariprasad.
In October this year, Surya led the ‘Nabanna Chalo’ rally in West Bengal—his first rally outside Karnataka—where thousands of BJP workers marched from Howrah to protest the killings of BJP workers in the state. In the rally, which was seen as a show of strength ahead of the West Bengal polls, Surya took on Mamata Banerjee and called her government "an apt example of fascist regime" and said the days of the Trinamool Congress were numbered. Following the clashes between the BJP protesters and the West Bengal police, Surya moved a breach of privilege motion against four police officers for "physical assault".
Surya had led a similar protest in 2017, the ‘Mangalore Chalo’ rally in Karnataka, to protest against the alleged killing of RSS workers in the coastal Karnataka region.
On November 24, Surya who was denied entry into the Osmania University in Hyderabad by the Telangana police, forced his entry into the campus along with his party workers, proclaiming that nobody could stop the youth from paying tributes to the martyrs of the Telangana movement.
Karnataka BJP has its share of popular Hindutva leaders like former minister Ananth Kumar Hegde, Mysuru MP Pratap Simha and Udupi-Chikmagalur MP Shobha Karandlaje, who are very vocal in pushing the party's agenda. However, Tejasvi Surya's legal knowledge, tech prowess, his social media presence and the age factor are certainly an added advantage as the party leadership is looking at grooming young leaders for a long haul.
Surya's open endorsement of a Hindu Rashtra is evident from his tweets. Soon after the Supreme Court verdict on Ram Mandir, Surya had tweeted saying, "Most important lesson is that control of State power by Hindus is absolutely essential for sustenance of Dharma. When we didn’t control State, we lost our temple. When we regained, we rebuilt. The 282 in 2014 & 303 in 2019 to Sri @narendramodi made today possible!."
He courted controversy when he called those who opposed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as “puncture wallahs and illiterates”.
In June 2018, when the BJP lost the Jayanagar assembly seat (which is part of Surya's parliamentary constituency), he tweeted, "Call me a bigot, communal fanatic or whatever. But singular reason for BJP's defeat in Jayanagar is the complete consolidation of Muslim vote. BJP must 'really' become a Hindu party & not just be perceived as one."
Surya had mentioned the voting numbers from Gurappanapalya, a Muslim locality.
His recent outburst against Owaisi has similar connotations.
"Owaisi is Mohammad Ali Jinnah's new avatar! We must defeat him. You vote for him here (Hyderabad), he emerges strong in Maharashtra, a Muslim locality in Karnataka, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh," said Surya in Hyderabad.
Even as the southern states are crying foul over "Hindi imposition" by the Centre, Surya's affinity towards Hindi has been scorned at back home. But his fluency in Hindi has proven to be his strength (very few politicians from Karnataka are fluent in Hindi) and he has been effortlessly leading the protests and campaigns, be it in Bihar, West Bengal or Telangana.
His fiery attacks and confrontations with the non-BJP governments are no doubt the saffron party's bid to portray itself as a "youth-centric" party, but it is also setting the tone and tenor for the major political showdowns in states like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala in the run up to the polls.
