It isn’t often that one bounces off the padded walls, here in our somnolent state. But there were two events, one, right here in our backyard, and one further afield in Bantwal that were appalling in their shocking disconnect between the men running the political shop at the very top, and the situation at Ground Zero where reality and the politician’s version of the truth violently collide.
In communally sensitive Bantwal, always on the knife edge between the largely Hindu fishing community and the preponderantly Muslim trader, the hacking to death of an RSS worker named Sharath Madiwala has lit a fire that the Siddaramaiah government has failed to douse with any sense of urgency.
Does it take one week for any policeman, beat or top cop, to realize that Section 144 has failed to keep the protestors and street processions and the attendant violence in check? As for the government of the day, shouldn’t visiting Bantwal and BC Road and the grieving Madiwalas take priority over strategising for a re-election a full year away? Why give room to criticism – well founded or otherwise – that the Congress’ appeasement of minorities is behind the killing of innocents.
Neither the Congress nor the BJP has ever baulked from pandering to their respective vote banks. And Bantwal is no exception. The two entrenched power brokers here are the BJP’s Kalladka Prabhakar Bhat and the Congress Ramanath Rai, whom the RSS denigrate as Karnataka’s Maulana Mulayam. Neither will give an inch. Both have a lock on their following, with Rai electorally unchallenged in the area since the mid-eighties.
It’s time matters were taken in hand. File the cases, put away the trouble-makers, whatever their nomenclature, Mr Chief Minister.
More so, now. The wave of anti-Muslim sentiment sweeping the nation that has followed on the heels of the rise and rise of the supreme ultra-nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi, has not left Bantwal or the rest of the deeply divided Dakshina Kannada untouched.
It’s given an opening to the BJP, looking for any and every opportunity to whip up their following into the hysteria that has all of northern India in its grip. Do we really want a lynch mob beating the s#*~ out of some poor, unsuspecting Kannadiga – Hindu or Muslim – as they do in the benighted, ignorant north?
Or for that matter in the killing fields of Kannur? Just across the border? And let me correct you there, Mr Yeddyurappa. In Kannur and Kasargod and the home of the Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, the leader of the Communist Party of India – Marxist in the afore-mentioned state of Kerala, the bloodlust, the cycle of blood-letting for over 60 years has seen the RSS and the Marxists hack away at each other. Not the Congress. The hapless target is nearly always a teacher, the man held in high esteem by his students. The job of finishing him off is done with that beautifully sharpened, curved little implement, the sickle, that either goes for the jugular, snaps the carotid artery or simply disembowels your belly.
The BJP has not hesitated to cast the first stone, either, in the scandalous mis-handling of the whistle-blower cop who has opened a can of worms with her report on the manner in which the AIADMK power behind the Jayalalithaa throne is playing master puppeteer at the city’s Parappana Agrahara main prison!
Where is the state home minister? Just as PM Modi is stretched over the government’s handling of the twin foreign policy challenges posed on its western and eastern border by Pakistan and China, because he doesn’t have a foreign minister who can stay on top of the job - she isn’t in the pink of health - here too, in this state, a home minister driving the police force would have seen the red flags long before the very public falling out between the woman cop and her boss. The woman cop, undoubtedly is spilling the beans on Sasikala for the wrong reasons - she clearly has an axe to grind against her boss. But hey! Transferring her for going public? Bad move. Does Mr Siddaramaiah really want his police force to be seen as anti-women? Anupama Shenoy was the first to bring the problem faced by women in the force to the fore. D. Roopa won’t be the last.
The bigger issue is that – and it’s not political patronage, as the BJP now claims, the AIADMK and the Congress are and never will be friends or allies – the prisons in our country are dens of iniquity where prostitution and pimping, the drug trade and alcohol abuse and just plain thuggery is rampant. And for those doing time for crimes, it’s money that buys you the comforts of the world outside, the world that you have been banned from, for bending the very rules that you are breaking. On the inside. Let’s shut that down. Poor judgement. In Bantwal. And Bengaluru.
