How coastal Karnataka was saffronised; part 17: Multiple accounts from Dakshin Kannada describe how divisive politics corroded everyday lives

Editor’s note: This is the seventeenth reported piece in an 18-part series on the contemporary history of Hindutva in coastal Karnataka. The series features interviews, videos, archival material and oral histories gathered over a period of four months.

  Read other articles of the series here

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South Karnataka has a different side to offer everybody. For the occasional tourist, it brings forth images of the pristine coastline. For a historian, Karavalli is a treasure trove, with the expanse left by successive rulers and colonial governments. Even better for oral historians, as the majority, Tulu speaking population of this region believes in deities rooted in their past, the stories of whom have been passed on from generation to generation.

Residents will enthral you with multiple cuisines that South Canara is home to. If you are a Hindu, a must visit itinerary of temples across the region, starting from the Ashta Mutt in Udupi to Someshwara Temple will be handed over to you. The treasure troves for Christians are similar, starting with the iconic Milagres Church to the Rosario Cathedral. For the Muslims, there is the Zeenat Baksh Masjid, a sixth-century relic. For Jains, there is the Gomateshwara statue in Karakala. Once the architecture and cuisine are covered, if the subject of communalism is broached, many will vehemently deny that Mangaluru has anything to do with the violence of any nature. Others will also deny but will also softly flag Muslims as trouble-makers.

Maybe, I could work my way through the initial denial I was offered because most people I spoke to in Dakshin Kannada considered me as one among them. But my upbringing in Tamil Nadu still made me an outsider to the land which I have called my native. I didn’t find much in common with the people I spoke to, other than the common tongue we spoke and the food we mutually loved, but I collected stories and have been trying to make sense of them since.

One thing I’ve understood is that every generation in South Karnataka have their own story of waking up to communal polarisation which this region represents. Some readily offer explanations for the other and others finish with the customary ’this is not how it actually is’. The modes and methods through which the existential realities of life in Coastal Karnataka dawned on those who’ve shared their stories with me are different. But the fact that divisive politics has started to define every aspect of life here is something which is hard to miss.

The stories across districts are different. Sullia and Dharmasthala are worlds apart from Mangaluru or Udupi. Within Mangaluru, the urban centre of Coastal Karnataka, Falnir and Bunder hold difference experiences. A resident of Surathkal has a different story to tell as opposed to others who are staying in Karangalpady.

Life in Sullia

Twenty-four-year-old Shruti (name changed on request) hails from Sullia. She is cherubic and energetic when she speaks, be it about her work as a community counsellor or about ‘communal harmony’, a concept she is trying to inculcate in schoolgoing children. “It is something I can only talk about as a concept considering where I come from,” Shruti tells me while reassuring everybody in the room that “it will happen.”

Sullia, where Shruti was born and brought up, is both beautiful and communal. The reigning BJP MLA S Angara has not lost from the region in thirty years.

As a child, Shruti was told that there is nothing more distasteful than talking to a Muslim boy. This was reiterated in the rallies of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad she attended in college. “My community is dead against any kind of interaction with Muslims,” says Shruti. The Arebasha-speaking Gowda community are dominant in Sullia. There are hardly any towns or villages in the taluk where there is a mixed population. Ali Sadiq (name changed on request) a young research scholar views this differently.

“Our ghettoisation is our strength, it helps us stay together and feel a bit secure,” says Sadiq, who for the first time came to terms with his Muslim identity when he was a young boy when his classmates told him he had lost the Kargil war. “I can’t speak about it like it is some tragedy. It is pretty routine. We go our way, they go theirs,” says Hajida (name changed on request), a school teacher from Aranthodu.

All three have witnessed or been part of incidents where a friend or someone they knew was beaten up for talking to women from the opposite community. “Everything starts with ‘girl matters’. If they find us talking to Hindu women, they will pass the message among their groups and soon the boy will get beaten up,” says Sadiq. Sadiq mentions how vehicles which ferry people across Sullia town are especially notorious in keeping track of who talks to whom.

RSS-led mobilisations are common in Sullia. A rumour of an alleged conversion sparked mobilisations across Sullia in 2017. “I saw my classmates join the rally and forcing Muslim businessmen to shut shop. But the funny thing is normalcy quickly returns after these mobilisations. People don’t even follow up or talk about the incident in question. Whether this conversion happened or not, who is this man who they converted, nobody knows. Nobody tried to find out,” says Charan Ivarnad who was a student council member when he studied at KVG College in Sullia.

Charan says that the same thing had happened when ABVP objected to Muslim girls wearing the burqa in a neighbouring degree college. “This spread to my college, too. For a day, everybody shouted slogans and the administration pacified them saying they will try to bring uniform rules for everybody. But it has been two years, nothing has changed.”

Charan, Sadiq and Shruti are strangers to each other. But they can be seen as part of a small crop of youngsters from Sullia who are trying to get to the root cause of what makes their home so polarised.

Till he was a teen, Sadiq looked up to the Karnataka Forum for Dignity (KFD) and longed to be a member. “We were being called traitors, killers, terrorists. This is when KFD emerged. It sought to instil some sense of self-respect in us,” he says.

He feels like the time is not that dismal for Muslims, at least not in the areas where they are a majority. He mentions how a couple of years ago, the Muslim meat vendor from his locality bought 15-kg beef from a neighbouring district to circulate among Muslim families on the occasion of Milad-un-nabi (birthday of Prophet Muhammad). Getting wind of this, a group of Bajrang Dal members waylaid him when he got off the bus. Fearing for his life, he made a run for it, leaving the meat behind. When he returned with others to recover the meat from them, they were told that the meat was buried. “The next day, a cow was slaughtered inside the locality and meat was distributed to every family. Nothing happened,” says Sadiq with a smile.

“When I was a child, my father used to send me to school along with the Muslim fish vendor who used to visit our house every day. The animosity created in the past few decades between communities is heart-breaking,” says Gulabi Bilimele, an activist from Mangaluru who was brought up in a village in Sullia. She also recollects how most stalls at the yearly fair of the Pancha Lingeshwara Devasthana in Sullia were run by Muslims. “But this was stopped. The temple committee passed an ordinance because of which Muslims were disallowed from setting up stores.”

Rumours are another attribute of Sullia and they spread quickly, especially in 4G-fuelled times. She heard the rumour of how Muslim fruit vendors inject the fruits they sell with AIDS. Hajida remembers another one, where it was said that Hindus are being given separate vaccines which would kill them sooner. Rumours like these abound in this region — ranging from silly gossip to methods where men, women and children have been forcefully converted.

Shruti feels like they are too habituated to these stories. It is no longer peculiar and doesn’t evoke strong emotions, except when there is an incident. “The ghettos have formed in our thought processes, it is in us.”

The boundaries are defined clearly in a district such as Sullia. Its ingrown whisper networks keep a check on who interacts with whom, who crosses the line and who need a rap on their knuckles when they go astray. In urban Mangaluru, the lines are not that clear. But the stories are.

Urban Mangaluru

Growing up in a protected elite atmosphere within Mangaluru didn’t prepare Dr Haneena Fathima for the aggression she would face on social media. Her circles, in school and university, had been inter-religious without an element of insecurity that many other Muslims in Dakshin Kannada face. While she had resisted attempts by her cousins to police her as she grew up, her occasional statutes on Facebook started attracting anti-Muslim tropes. Social media welcomed her to the world of Islamophobia. “A friend on Facebook called me ‘Pakistani’ for sharing a poster on the Kathua rape and murder. Any kind of criticism I share on the policies of the government, I am told to respond for atrocities committed by Muslim rulers in the past. Why?” questions Haneena.

Ruthba Rawoof feels the brunt of these questions more than Haneena. “The identity of Hijabis like myself is very visible. We are more Muslim to outsiders than anybody from the community. Wherever I go, I feel like I am being watched,” says Ruthba. Ruthba is a psychologist who grew up in Karkala and then moved to Mangaluru. She remembers a childhood in a multi-religious society, where the distinctions weren’t as stark as they are now.

Ruthba has trained herself not to let emotions get to her on social media. “What is the point? I will ruin a personal relationship over a Facebook fight. Instead, I prefer not discussing anything political. I don’t have the luxury to do it and I have made my peace with it.”

While Ruthba took to silence, Shariq Ali, a practising lawyer, deleted his Facebook account. Among his friends, Shariq Ali’s humour is celebrated. While they hang out at a ‘safe spot’, Shariq tells me why he quit Facebook in 2014 around the time of the Lok Sabha elections. “It was just getting nastier by the day on Facebook. The fake news, the insults, the targeted posts. I just wanted to live my life,” says Shariq.

Shariq has friends who support right-wing ideology. “But they transform when they get on Facebook. It is like something takes over them. They are like a mob, going around looking for people to pick fights with.” Shariq’s friend Mamatha Gatti who has been sitting across and listening to Shariq’s story attributes the nature of Mangaluru’s multicultural population for the manner in which things have turned out. “People are sensitive about their religious identities. And when there are so many identities, they are quick to take offence. It is because people are very rooted in their culture.”

Cultural rift - back and forth

Some agree on this, some disagree. Scholars have written about how the local population, over the past few decades, has gone through a virtual identity crisis as the region ushered into a phase of modernity and tried to adapt a takeover of a new and acceptable homogenised form of religion which it was not used to. This involved dismissing previous practises and adapting newer modes.

“We stopped attending Deiva aradhanes at our ancestral place because my father was disgusted by the way in which the entire ordeal was being conducted. We visited temples now and then but we fell out of touch with our village deities,” recollects Shyamala Madhav, an author from Mangaluru, who moved to Mumbai in 1970. Deiva aradhane as the local form of worship faced neglect up until the 1980s. It was viewed as a regressive and backward practice, as it involved animal sacrifice and spirit possession.

The economy was bad, as well. There wasn’t enough money to spend.

But with a fresh inflow of money, migrants from Gulf and Mumbai, who wanted to establish their newly acquired clout back home, reinvigorated deiva aradhane. These fresh investments came with alterations. The stories of the deivas started to change. Brahmins started officiating at these sites and deivas, who were otherwise local heroes, now become incarnations of Vishnu and Shiva.

“I’ve never seen Hindus being too religious. But they get over religious only when it comes to coming together and hating Muslims. Most Muslims, on the other hand, are very religious and this is why they get so sentimental even for the pettiest of abuses, which we should ideally ignore,” says Haneena. This observation holds true, considering the fact that modern Hindu society still thrives on caste identities, even when there is a homogenised Hindu identity.

There are many who feel like the situation wasn’t as bad till just a few years back.

Preeti LN is doing her PHD in the United Kingsom but things back home in Mangaluru irk her often. She feels that she or her friends didn’t feel the heat of the polarisation as much as it is felt now. “We didn’t let ideologies or opinions matter, those were simpler times. Of course, this was before the real coming of the social media”.

Social media and youth mobilisations

The most popular social media pages in the Dakshin Kannada region routinely share memes and troll posts which promote the ideology of the Sangh. It has also been a centre for the emergence of youth groups like the Namo Brigade - which played a crucial role during campaigning in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

The founder of Namo Brigade in Mangaluru Naresh Shenoy is the prime accused in the murder of RTI activist Vinayak Baliga. Shenoy was instrumental in mobilising thousands of youths ahead of the 2014 elections. He is part of many such groups, another one of them being Yuva Brigade, co-founded by Chakravarthy Sulibele. Sulibele has been in the news for making communally-charged speeches. However, members of the Yuva Brigade feel that the founders are being targeted because they are speaking about the conditions of Hindus in the region, which they think is “deplorable”.

Postcard News , whose founder Mahesh Kumar Hegde is now under arrest for spreading fake news (he was also arrested in 2018 for the same reason), is a popular portal in Dakshin Kannada. Most of its posts are circulated on various Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups dominated by karyakartas and members of the Sangh who hold the key to keep the region on the boil. Almost everybody who spoke to me showed the conversations on their WhatsApp groups.

Whether these were groups created by friends, family or other peer groups, right-wing messages slither in via various members on a daily basis. Most of these messages are of a communal nature.

Vilas Nayak is the great-grandson of Upendra Nayak, who was elected as MLA from Udupi in 1957. He owns a TV channel, heads a business chain and is the President of the VHP Udupi wing. He says he is one of the few youngsters from the Gaud Saraswat Brahmin community to foray into business. While he says that the Sangh Parivar’s activities are essential in the face of growing extremism seeping into Karnataka from Kerala, he also reiterated that the same hasn’t really helped the growth of trade and commerce in the region.

Politics, he feels, doesn’t help anybody these days. “Back in the time of my grandfather, only those who were educated and deserved such positions were elected. But after political parties started pandering to castes, anyone who can bring in the numbers and belongs to a particular caste, makes it.” He is convinced that Brahmins won’t get nominations from parties that easily anymore.

The Gaud Saraswat Brahmin community held sway over all the organisations which entered South Canara and still continues to be the backbone of the RSS.

Love Jihad or Land Jihad?

Leaders from the Sangh call Vidya Dinker Leftist for shaping up people’s movements against indiscriminate land acquisition while CPI(M) and other progressive leaders call her right-wing for working with the Hindu Jagarana Vedike and Vishwa Theerta to stop the acquisition of Phase-II of the Mangaluru SEZ project.

Her famous line - “Your dog is barking, control it” - to the DGP of Karnataka is a story which refuses to die down. She was referring to a police officer overseeing an eviction in front of the DGP.

Her support to both, Deepak Rao’s and Basheer’s, family seemed to unsettle many. “They just can’t stop speculating what label to give me!” says Vidya with her trademark broad smile. But communalism isn’t where Vidya started her work.

Vidya was walking to her flat in 2007 when a celebrated architect, the go-to man of real estate barons of Mangaluru, accosted her. He got off his car, walked towards Vidya and slapped her across her face while softly muttering, “Take all your petitions back or you will suffer.” Vidya walked off. She didn’t go to the police. She didn’t file an FIR or let anyone other than her family know. She didn’t want people around her to give in to the fear being mounted on them by builders across the city. She had received threats from two underworld kingpins already and one of them was Bannajay Raja.

In another incident, a friend invited her to lunch. Only when she got to the restaurant did she realise it was a set up. Close to 12 men surrounded her at the table. They were part-time Bajrang Dal, part-time workers at a security agency (the one which provides security to most malls in Mangaluru). They told her to withdraw her petition against Cinnepolis, a movie theatre located in a mall in the middle of the city.

The mall didn’t meet the required zoning and fire safety requirements and Vidya’s petition had stalled the opening of this Cineplex for close to five years. She managed to wiggle her way out of there but such incidents were gradually becoming normal for Vidya. As of 2006, the approval received by 85 high rise buildings were stayed by the Karnataka High court. Till date, not more than 12 have seen the light of the day.

“Isn’t it surprising how all of them come together when its business? The real estate lobby which came after me had everybody in on it. Take a look at the members of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India, Mangaluru. Nobody is a Hindu or a Muslim then, they just want all the land and money they can get their hands on,” says Vidya while posing another question, “The right wing tried floating a concept called ‘Land Jihad’ alleging that Muslims are buying out all the land in Mangaluru. Overnight, it fizzled out. How come?”

“Muslims are communal as well”

Irshad Uppinangady is fighting a different battle as compared to the ones above mentioned. In his own words, he is attempting to ‘control the RSS-types among the Muslim circles’. During Ramazan, a message was circulated primarily on Muslim groups that Muslim women were eating food in the Food Court of City Centre Mall. “The message said ’teach them a lesson’. I informed the Commissioner of Police immediately. He arrested the persons who were circulating these messages.”

Irshad is a former member of the Popular front of India (PFI). He quit the group when he realised that they didn’t align with his vision of how the Muslim community should politically organise themselves.

“Why should we mimic the methods of the RSS? Young Muslim men have started policing Muslim women. They think it is on them to safeguard our women. Sounds to me like the tunes that these Bajrang Dal cadre sing all the time,” says Irshad. The General Secretary of PFI in Karnataka, Yassir Hassan, on the other hand says it is dangerous to dismiss the entire organisation on the basis of what some of its cadre do.

“We don’t instruct our cadre to do any form of policing. We are only interested in making Muslims a politically-conscious community. Now, if some of our cadre get caught doing these things how can you blame us for it?”

Pre-social media

Muneer Katipala was younger than Preeti, Haneena, Ruthba, Irshad and Shariq when he lived through the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. His days of witnessing a communal divide came much before the descent of social media. Those were the days when Ram Mandir was trending. Not on Facebook or Whatsapp, but on the ground, among the masses.

“There was an undercurrent of tension after Advani was arrested in 1991. RSS organised programs and took out marches about Ram Mandir regularly. We would talk in our circles but it didn’t affect life,” says Muneer who was in high school back then. He remembers that cricket was in vogue during the time.

Muneer was part of a cricket team called ‘Friends Circle’. “It had Billavas, Mansas, Bunts, Bearys, Catholics and every community in the area where I lived. We won matches regularly, we were pretty popular. Particularly, our opening batsman Ravi Kotian was really good.” He recollects playing with his teammates when the news of Babri Masjid’s demolition made way into his area. They continued playing and went home after.

The next day, Muslims in the area had shut their shops protesting the demolition. “We met to play in the evening like every other day, when an announcement was made on the mic of our masjid requesting Muslims to rush as a large group with weapons was approaching the area. Muslims, like me, ran to the masjid and the rest to the Deiva stana which was just around the corner.”

“The mob reached the masjid and set it on fire. They left after tying a saffron cloth around the minar of the Masjid.” He says people in the area pointed to the Muslim houses and the mob vandalised these houses. “Us, our cricket teams and this area has never been the same again. You’ll hear cricket teams which go by the name Green Star or Bajrangi now. You can predict who will be in each of these teams. No longer are our houses together. In Surathkal, there are segregated areas for Muslims and Hindus.”

Muneer lives in Krishnapura which is part of Surathkal. When major projects like the New Mangalore Port Trust (NMPT) and the Mangalore Refinery and Petrchemical Limited (MRPL) came along, most of the displaced population was moved to Surathkal. The resettlement happened in a peculiar manner.

In an almost ghettosised manner, Muslim communities were moved to one corner and the non-Muslims to the other. As more families were displaced due to subsequent projects like the Mangalore Special Economic Zone, the ghettos further expanded. Another resettlement site which is much older than Surathkal is Bengre. The British, while building railway lines in 1875, resettled close to forty families from the fishing community of the Moghaveeras. While the Moghaveeras took charge of one portion of Bengre, the other part grew into a Muslim ghetto.

Resettlement served to divide communities along religious lines, which manifests itself during riots. These regions, be it Surathkal, Bengre or Bunder, are usually the most-affected.

Bunder

Just before the docks of Bunder begin, there are the markets. These markets have existed for centuries and are still a thriving space for commerce.

Ruhia Hussain is a young graduate from St. Agnes and has lived in Bunder since she was a child. “The area is like two portions. On one side are the Muslim establishments and on the other side is everybody else.” During the 2006 riots, she witnessed petrol bombs being flung from both sides of the street.

But Shariq Ali also remembers 2006 as one of the last full-fledged riots. “It was so much so that nobody really understood why the killings or attacks were happening. These things usually happen and our lives would go on regardless. But people just got tired after 2006. We were locked in for a whole week with no supplies. The departmental store would be open for just an hour and we would all rush to get our hands on anything which will take us through the next day. Nobody asked religion at the store.”

After weeks of rioting in 2006, things simmered down. They surfaced in 2008, when Christian institutions were targetted across Coastal Karnataka. “We never involved ourselves in anything. But in 2008, we were in for a shock,” says Collette Rose Nasarath, a resident of Padil in Mangalore.

For close to a month, starting in August 2008, there were organised events targeting Christians. It escalated in September with churches being vandalised and in one incident, a group of Bajrang Dal activists desecrating the chapel of the monastery of the Sisters of St Clare in Mangalore. The sisters in the Monastery were roughed up. As a response, many Christians took to the streets which resulted in altercations. The situation remained grim for close to a month. It eventually died down and the community reverted to being a distant onlooker in the scheme of things in Coastal Karnataka.

“In the months to follow, we took to praying and growing closer as a community. My people have never really taken a stand about what goes on in the region. They prefer to ignore and let it be,” says Collete.

Catholics in Coastal Karnataka are viewed as being distant from the Hindu-Muslim skirmishes in the city. Many have stayed away or have been passive supporters of the Sangh. A few Muslims whom I spoke to, said that Catholics were more Islamophobic than Hindus. While this might have a historic reason tracing the rift back to anti-Semitism, the Catholics in Coastal Karnataka might have their own stories of violence. Many still offer stories of persecution at the hands of Tipu Sultan as a reason to be averse to Muslims.

Eric Ozario, a Konkani activist, is leading a struggle to oppose eviction of converted migrants like himself from an area called Jeppu Compound in Mangaluru.

The Mangalore Diocese has been trying to evict settlers in this area, who have lived after being allotted that land by the Church, for at least three generations. Eric is very passionate about taking on Church. He has strong words for the institution that the church has become. “The majority of the Catholic community has not come out in our support. They have never been vocal about anything that goes on here. Silent spectators, that is what is best to define Catholics in Mangalore,” states Eric. Eric says that the outrage after the church attacks was short lived. “The experience must’ve thought us to be more up and about in opposing these forces but no, that wasn’t the case,” remarks Ozario.

Unlike Ozario, other Catholics aren’t as passionate. Some tell me that they prefer to stay away from polarising politics in the region. As most come from families which own businesses, this works out for best, they say. The ones who are vocal, like Colette and Eric, don’t find a lot of support. In fact, Colette’s attitude has got her into confrontations, the most recent one being with a professor from SDM Law College.

Mahesh Chandra Nayak was Professor who taught me Environmental Law. He always sported a big red tilak which used to make me wonder if he was a supporter of the Sangh, but the years I was a student of Nayak, he never aired which ideology he endorses. Things took a turn after 2014, I was told by my juniors. In the past few years, I have seen Nayak getting into ugly social media fights with many of my friends, most of them Christians and Muslims.

One reason could be that a handful of those, who identified as Hindus from my college, said anything against the Sangh. Even if they were against the Sangh, I didn’t see them being as active as the others. Nevertheless, on one occasion, Nayak commented this under Colette’s status:

When Colette protested about the usage of words, things turned ugly and it ended with Nayak using a Tulu slur word against Colette. Some of us came together and emailed SDM Law College. They said that they cannot take responsibility for the statements he made on social media. But in a second email, they informed us that they’ve issued him a notice and have warned him about his behaviour. During our emails to the management of SDM Law College, Nayak called up Colette multiple times, pleading with her not to take action while repeating that he had young daughters who he had to feed.

After this conversation, Colette messaged on the common WhatsApp group that we created to coordinate what had to be done. She said she doesn’t want to harm the man and that she was really tired of the ordeal.

When I was studying in Mangaluru, Facebook wasn’t as popular as it is today. Even so, the content on social media was usually memes on comical Tulu expressions, photos of the coastline and posts talking about ‘Mangalore beauty’. Social media now has become a battleground. The most popular meme pages of the region are run and maintained by supporters and members of the Sangh. The extent of polarisation that happens on social media is the highest in Coastal Karnataka and it is constant.