Old Mysuru has become the new battleground in Karnataka politics. The region, which has 59 seats spread across nine districts, looks set to witness a fierce, triangular contest between the Janata Dal (Secular), the Congress and the BJP.
The reason is that the Vokkaliga community, politically dominant and numerically strong, appears torn between its love for JD(S) patriarch and former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda and the fresh overtures of the Congress and the BJP. The Congress has taken the gamble of elevating Vokkaliga leader D.K. Shivakumar as state party chief, while the BJP is mixing its development mantra with invocations of “Vokkaliga pride”.
Having reached saturation point in the rest of the state, the BJP is hoping to make inroads into Old Mysuru. Despite winning 104 seats and emerging as the single-largest party in 2018, the party was unable to form government. It had to ‘import’ 17 Congress and JD(S) legislators―several of them Vokkaligas―to finally come to power in 2019.
That the BJP has its eyes on Old Mysuru became clear on December 31, 2022, when Union Home Minister Amit Shah visited Mandya, a district in the region, to sound the party’s poll bugle. “A vote for the JD(S) is a vote for the Congress,” he told voters. “Vote for the Congress, and H.D. Kumaraswamy [of the JD(S)] will sit on the Congress’s lap. Give the BJP a chance to form government with full majority, and we will end corruption, dynastic politics and casteism in five years.”
The BJP is eyeing 54 of 59 seats in the region. Currently, the JD(S) holds 27 seats; the Congress and the BJP have 17 and 13, respectively. Two seats are with independents.
All fired up: Deve Gowda and H.D. Kumaraswamy inaugurating the JD(S)’s election tour in Kolar.
The Vokkaligas are the largest community in Karnataka after Lingayats and Muslims. Most Vokkaligas identify themselves as “anti-Congress” and support the JD(S). The community’s shift away from the Congress started in the 1970s, when chief minister D. Devaraj Urs was seen as appeasing dalits, tribals and backward communities when he extended reservation benefits.
The Vokkaligas have also not supported political experiments to expand the JD(S)’s reach. In 2005, Kuruba leader Siddaramaiah, who was then with the JD(S), held ‘Ahinda’ conventions to consolidate minority, backward class and dalit votes. The move was perceived as “anti-Vokkaliga” and he was expelled from the party.
Siddaramaiah joined the Congress in 2005. He felt the Vokkaliga heat again in 2018, when he was forced to hunt for a safe seat in Old Mysuru after he was perceived to have “badmouthed” Deve Gowda. As incumbent chief minister, he lost elections in his home turf, Chamundeshwari, part of the Mysore Lok Sabha constituency, because of a mass mobilisation in the community. A victory in Badami in Bagalkot district, part of north Karnataka, helped Siddaramaiah retain a seat in the assembly.
Gowda, 89, is undoubtedly the tallest Vokkaliga leader. Known for being simple, sharp and proficient in English, he relentlessly champions the cause of farmers, especially those in the Cauvery basin. In fact, Gowda owes his political rise to the Cauvery water-sharing dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
The dispute has its basis on two agreements signed between the erstwhile princely state of Mysore and the Madras presidency in 1892 and 1924. The agreements bar Karnataka (the upper riparian state) from building dams across the Cauvery without the consent of Tamil Nadu (one of the two lower riparian states).
Stepping up: D.K. Shivakumar during the launch of a padyatra in Kanakapura | Bhanu Prakash Chandra
“At 31, the first-time legislator Gowda moved a private member’s resolution on harnessing Cauvery waters to utilise it for the betterment of the people in the river basin, especially in Hassan, Coorg, Mysore, Mandya, Tumkur, Chitradurga and Bangalore districts, which were dominated by the Vokkaliga community,” writes Sugata Srinivasaraju in Furrows in a Field: The Unexplored Life of H.D. Deve Gowda. “Then chief minister S. Nijalingappa and PWD minister Veerendra Patil, both Lingayat leaders who controlled north Karnataka, asked Gowda to withdraw the resolution, sensing it would make the north-south divide in Karnataka more obvious. The Cauvery issue became the cornerstone of Gowda’s politics.”
An adamant Gowda forced the government to build the Harangi and Hemavathy reservoirs, which brought riches to Old Mysore’s sugarcane belt. He built a political movement around Cauvery that revived the Vokkaliga hopes of weilding political power.
In 1994, Gowda became chief minister almost four decades after Kadidal Manjappa, a Vokkaliga who last held the post. Later, Karnataka saw two more Vokkaliga chief ministers―S.M. Krishna of the Congress and H.D. Kumaraswamy of the JD(S).
C.S. Dwarakanath, former chairperson of the Karnataka State Commission for Backward Classes, said Vokkaligas revere Gowda for his key role in including Vokkaligas in rural areas in the Central list of Other Backward Communities. “The community was included in the Central OBC list after [the implementation of] the Mandal Commission report. In fact, Deve Gowda included several communities―such as Halakki and Sarpa Vokkaligas, and Bunts―in the OBC list,” he said. “Today, Vokkaligas are demanding an enhanced quota―from 4 per cent to 12 per cent―that is proportional to their estimated population.”
Gowda’s popularity grew with his efforts to organise the community. “Subcastes like Gangatkar, Marasu, Musuku, Dasa, Kunchitiga and Beralukodo Vokkaligas were united,” said Dwarakanath. “The Adichunchanagiri Mutt emerged as a unifying factor. Also, Gowda boosted the community’s claim to political power when he appropriated Nadaprabhu Kempe Gowda (a chieftain under Vijayanagara empire) as a Vokkaliga icon. Till then, Kempe Gowda was claimed to be ‘Thigalar Gowda’ by the Thigala (horticulturists) community.”
Over the years, Gowda’s penchant for putting family ahead of politics has led to an erosion in the JD(S) support base. Many prominent leaders have quit the party in the past two decades. Gowda himself was defeated in the Tumakuru Lok Sabha seat in 2019, exposing the resentment against his family in the JD(S).
A section of Vokkaligas is now eyeing the Congress because it has appointed Shivakumar as the state party chief. “The Vokkaliga community would shift its loyalties only if convinced that a fellow Vokkaliga is projected as the CM candidate. But both the Congress and the BJP have shied away from it,” said Dwarakanath.
The infighting within the Congress has cornered Shivakumar and given the upper hand to legislative party leader Siddaramaiah, AICC chief Mallikarjun Kharge and former deputy chief minister G. Parameshwara. Both Kharge and Parameshwara are dalits. Also, Shivakumar is busy battling a slew of cases filed against him by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate. Given the circumstances, a section of Vokkaligas are most likely to tilt towards the BJP.
The BJP is trying hard to push the message that there is little difference in voting for its rivals. In his speech on December 31, Shah recalled how the JD(S) and the Congress had come together to form a coalition government in 2018, after the BJP fell eight seats short of majority. He said the JD(S) had “blackmailed” the Congress into giving it the chief minister’s post, even though it won only 37 seats.
“Political instability is not good for development,” said Shah. “Here is an opportunity to settle scores with those parties who win a handful of seats and resort to blackmail.”
The BJP, however, has long been accused of playing Lingayat-centric politics. The saffron party holds sway in the Lingayat-dominant north and central Karnataka, apart from its dominance in coastal Karnataka, which is perceived as a hindutva laboratory.
The party’s national leadership has been trying to wean the state unit off its over-dependence on one community. In July 2021, in an effort to expand its reach and diversify its leadership, the BJP elevated two Vokkaliga faces: Malleswaram legislator C.N. Ashwath Narayan was appointed as a deputy chief minister, and Chikmagalur MLA C.T. Ravi was made the party’s national general secretary. Also, Lingayat strongman B.S. Yediyurappa was replaced as chief minister by fellow Lingayat leader Basavaraj Bommai.
Urban Vokkaligas now openly support the BJP, but rural voters have chosen to remain with the JD(S). In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP led in more than 170 assembly segments. This has apparently prompted the party to rely on the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the run-up to the polls, instead of projecting Bommai as its face.
The BJP also appears to be attempting an ideological merger between “Vokkaliga pride” and its hindutva agenda. In November last year, Modi unveiled a 108ft bronze statue of Kempe Gowda, called the Statue of Prosperity, near the Bengaluru International Airport. Ashwath Narayan, one of its Vokkaliga faces, recently sprang a surprise when he proposed an “Ayodhya-like Ram temple” at Ramadevarabetta in Ramanagara district. The state leadership is reportedly planning to invite Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to lay the foundation for the temple. The strategy, apparently, is to highlight the ‘Nath panth’, a Shaivite sub-tradition shared by Gorakhnath Math in UP (where Yogi was the head priest) and the Adichunchanagiri Mutt in Karnataka, a Vokkaliga mutt.
Communal polarisation is part of the mix. The BJP has been painting Tipu Sultan, the 18th-century ruler of Mysore, as a religious bigot, and portraying two Vokkaliga soldiers―Uri Gowda and Nanje Gowda―as heroes who killed the Muslim ruler. “The next election is between Tipu Sultan and Mysuru Wadiyars,” said C.T. Ravi while addressing a rally in Mandya. “Wadiyars, and not Tipu, contributed to [the development] of Mandya. It wasn’t Tipu who was the tiger; the tigers were Uri Gowda and Nanje Gowda.”
The JD(S) has swung into action to neutralise the saffron threat. Kumaraswamy has begun a tour to reach out to voters, while Deve Gowda has been placating disgruntled JD(S) leaders. Said Kumaraswamy: “If the BJP thinks they can win over Vokkaligas by erecting statues or promising to build a Ram temple in my constituency, it is only an illusion.”