The Flag, The Language, The Lingayat Card. Borrowing from Amit Shah's playbook?

Shekhar Gupta is the ultimate journalist. He puts you at ease and then, when you let your guard down, he throws the hard questions at you. The consummate conversationalist. But politicians, particularly those who are facing a do or die election, and who – strangely - aren’t supremely confident they can decimate the opposition as they had the last time around, will do what they are best at – feint, thrust, parry and stall. 

And that’s the reason that Chief Minister Siddaramaiah’s interview, which was clearly meant to push back at the growing unease that the divisive brand of politics normally seen as the BJP’s modus operandi in the run up to all recent elections had not been co-opted by the Congress, did not clear the air at all. Instead what came across was this - the Congress party unit was not just borrowing from the Amit Shah playbook, it had made it, its own.

The Flag. The Language. The Lingayat card… The three most emotive issues that anybody could have found in a state as cast in stone as this one when it comes to caste and community. Karnataka was carved out in 1956 from neighbouring ‘presidencies’ and is still known by its linkages to them. Hyderabad Karnataka, Mysore Karnataka, being just two examples. It is a state that is united, some say by one thing alone - the spoken tongue, dialects and all.

Really? 70 years after independence, 61 years after the state was formed, our identity as Indians, part of the India after Gandhi and Nehru, counts for nothing? Instead, it is our pared down individuality of birth and caste and language and religion that defines us? 

On the language controversy that blew in from nowhere, one must say this. Should a transport system like the Metro in a city like Bengaluru - chick magnet for a growing Indian workforce from across the country as well as a healthy complement of foreigners – be identified only by the native language of that city? 

It’s a message board, people. The signboard tells the non-natives how to get around, what station he’s at, how many stops before he gets to the next one, what the time lag is…in as many languages as possible.

It has nothing to do with the primacy of Kannada. It does not devalue Karnataka’s celebrated litterateurs, its poetry, its music, its riveting history and culture. This is not about putting Hindi over Kannada. And what the state of Kerala does at its metro or what Maharashtra or for that matter, West Bengal has done, is completely irrelevant here. Bengaluru has an identity, that is all of its own, that sets it apart from every other city and state. It cannot be put into a box that is defined by one language, one community, one people. If there is one thing about Bengaluru that makes one proud is that one size does not fit all.    

Why pander to these regressive sentiments in a city, home to a multitude of tongues and dialects, even within the Kannada lingua franca? Aah, but in an election year, even when these fringe groups count for little electorally, and are more a law and order issue, this is allowed to continue. The khakis? Effete. Ordered to look the other way when the goons run amok?

As for the other hot button issue, ‘The Flag’... a committee will decide whether Karnataka needs a flag, other than the national flag? Ahem! It already has its own notional flag, doesn’t it? The red and yellow pennant with the Goddess Bhuvaneshwari front and centre, that is de rigeur, one thought at every state formation day, and wonderful to see fluttering from every autorickshaw in the city. 

Why make an issue where none exists? And incidentally it’s not as if BJP leader B.S. Yeddyurappa hasn’t gone down this particular road before. He put forward much the same plea to then prime minister Manmohan Singh, who shot it down saying it was unconstitutional. 

Perhaps the flag-waving and the whipping up of sentiment over language, are the symptom, not the disease. Could it be, that when the number crunchers from his internal survey and his caste census team came back to him, they have told the Chief Minister a story that’s made him unsure over where the loyalties of his hitherto consolidated voter base lie? 

Is the loyal Ahinda vote bank that marks him out as the only leader in the Congress party who can bring in the OBC-SC-ST-Dalit vote, not a sure thing? Has Yeddyurappa’s outreach to the Dalits rattled him, eaten into the Congress base? Is this revenge?

The promotion of Karnataka culture, incidentally was Mr Siddaramaiah’s preserve in his earlier avatars as head of the so-called ‘kavalu committee’ under JD stalwart Ramakrishna Hegde and later, twice when he was deputy chief minister. So pulling that rabbit out of his hat is something of a political masterstroke. Neither the BJP nor his bete noire, H.D. Kumaraswamy in the JD (S) can mock him, or call him out on that and risk being seen as anti-Kannadiga.

This third card that the Chief Minister has thrown into the political cauldron therefore is the most intriguing – Lingayat as a full-fledged religion and not a caste. 

Some elements of the Kuruba community – to which the Chief Minister belongs -  one is told embraced Lingayat mores in the north, shared their vegetarianism and other practices. Is this whom the canny Siddu is wooing? Because BSY, revered by a community that believes it is their turn to sit at the helm, has the Lingayats, maths and swamis, in his pocket. 

A risk and a gamble, but when the difference between the Congress vote bank and the BJP’s is a mere .05 per cent, everybody and everything is up for grabs. Especially Amit Shah’s political playbook.