The BJP has noway won a clear maturity in Karnataka. It formed its governments throughpost-election hookups with independents and deserters from other parties. The party’s failure to cross the halfway mark on its own was criticized substantially on its low appeal in the Vokkaliga heartland, which includes the sections of Mandya, Bengaluru Rural, Hassan, Kolar and Chikballapura. The region has nearly mandated the political life of the Vokkaligas.
Members of the Vokkaligara Sangha innovated in 1906, and multitudinous other community-inclined individualities, besides the Adichunchunagiri Matha, the lone Vokkaliga mutt located in the Mandya quarter, helped mobilise the Vokkaliga identity across southern Karnataka over the last century.
Because of their sweats to push ultramodern knowledge and insure advanced representation in politics and bureaucracy, the Vokkaligas, a landed, meat- eating community, surfaced as a dominant estate in Karnataka. That is, a numerically large and politically influential estate. They make up 11.5 percent of the state’s total population and, since Independence, a quarter of the tagged lawmakers in the Karnataka assembly have been Vokkaligas on average. In the complex process of estate conformation seen across India in the 20th century, the Vokkaliga community came to include dozens of sub-castes from across South Karnataka, all of whom were doubtful to have married into each other’s communities indeed till the 1960s.
Over the last two decades, the BJP has been suitable to prize support from some sections of Vokkaligas in the civic centres of Bengaluru and Mysore, and in Malnad, Kodagu and Dakshina Kannada.
It’s a different story in the Vokkaliga heartland, however, which solidly backs the Janata Dal (temporal) and the Congress. The BJP’s preludes in this region haven’t yielded the results it would have hoped for. Besides offering clerical places, Rajya Sabha nominations, and directorships of government- run bodies to Vokkaligas, the ruling party has tried to prop up Vokkaliga leaders from among its lawmakers to gain support from the community.
DV Sadananda Gowda was made Chief Minister of Karnataka (2011-12) and R Ashoka and CN Ashwath Narayan have been Deputy Chief Ministers. But none of these political numbers have the leadership elevation among the Vokkaligas that’s enjoyed by JD (S) leaders-former Prime Minister Deve Gowda and his son HD Kumaraswamy- or by Congress leader DK Shivakumar.
The BJP has chased other emblematic strategies to cultivate Vokkaliga support. In recent times, there has been important talk about the historically close ties between the Adichunchunagiri Matha and the Yogi Adityanath- headed Goraknath Matha, both of which claim affinity to the Natha side.
Last time, in a monstrously publicized event, state BJP leaders inaugurated a giant 108- bottom statue of Kempegowda, the fabulous 16th-century author of Bengaluru, outside the megacity’s Kempegowda International Airport. But the elision of Deve Gowda from an event that had Prime Minister Narendra Modi as principal guest did not go down too well with the community and drew review that the BJP’s plan was to monopolies all credit for installing the statue of a Vokkaliga icon.
Amit Shah, the Union Home Minister, lately inaugurated another statue of Kempegowda and one of Basavanna, the author of the Lingayat community-the other dominant estate in Karnataka-in front of the Vidhana Soudha. The BJP government has also blazoned plans for a 108-bottom megalith gemstone statue of Kempegowda in a demesne not far from the field. Last month, Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai launched work on a keepsake in Bengaluru to popular Vokkaliga leader Ambarish, a filmstar and former Congress MP, and renamed a major road after him.
A many days a gone, Chief Minister Bommai removed the 4 reservation that Muslims were entitled to under the 27 OBC share and shifted them to the 10 Economically Weaker Section share. The 4 share that was freed up was said to pass on to the Vokkaligas and Lingayats, who had been demanding an increased share in reservations. (It latterly came clear that several other communities, including Jains and Christians, were also eligible for the 4 niche). Though the opinions are likely to be challenged in court for the lack of data to show that the Muslims are no longer socially and educationally backward, it nonetheless shows the BJP’s intent to win over the two dominant gentries while bending them against Muslims.
Two decades ago, the BJP’s shot to claim the Bababudangiri sanctum in Chikmaglur where both Hindus and Muslims have supplicated for centuries-as a Hindu sanctum, helped the party mobilise Hindu choosers around that region, which included a sizeable number of Vokkaligas.
The Bommai government has blazoned a plan to make a large Rama tabernacle on a hill in Ramanagara, a quarter with a large Vokkaliga population, which houses the constituencies of HD Kumaraswamy and DK Shivakumar.
Two times a gone, a original Hindutva group tried to stop the Christmas fests at a academy in Pandavapura in the Mandya quarter. Last time, a day after the Ugadi jubilee, when meat dishes are a must-have for the meat- eating gentries of southern Karnataka including the Vokkaligas, the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, Bajrang Dal and other Hindutva groups called for blacking Muslim- possessed meat booths. sweats like these, still, haven’t set up numerous takers.
