Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai during the Har Jatra Festival organized by Panchamasali Shri Jagadguru Peeta, in Harihar. Photo: Special Arrangement
IElection season in Karnataka. Political leaders are busy wooing saints of various religious maths belonging to specific caste groups. Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Bharatiya Janata Party national president JP Nadda, senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and others have all been doing the ‘math ka daur’ in recent times. Skeptics caution that approval from caste arithmetic does not necessarily translate into votes for that community’s leader or party. Nevertheless, these calculations have emerged as one of the key methods of making electoral inroads in specific communities. It doesn’t seem possible for any political party to oppose mathematics.
For the past several months, the reservation matrix of Karnataka has been in flux. Saints of various caste maths – Prasnanandapuri Swami of the Valmiki community, Jaya Mrityunjaya Swami of the Panchamasali-Lingayat community, Nirmalanandanatha Swami of the Vokkaligas and Niranjananandapuri Swami of the Kurubas, among others – are leading the movement, or appeal to set a deadline Doing the reservation for the better part of the pie for the government. The government has announced an increase in reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, which will benefit the Valmikis. It has also proposed a hike for Lingayats and Vokkaligas. But not everyone is happy. In fact discontent is simmering among various math sages. For example, Jaya Mrityunjaya Swamy has led at least two agitations in Shiggaon, the constituency of Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai. The Panchamasali movement led by the seer appears to be shaking the BJP’s carefully amassed vote bank of Lingayats.
Meanwhile, the BJP is keen to woo Nirmalanandanatha Swami of the Vokkaliga’s powerful Adichunchanagiri Mutt to make inroads in the Vokkaliga community and the old Mysore region, which has so far been the territory of the Janata Dal (Secular) and the Congress parties. , The BJP seems enthused by the seer’s recent comparison of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Vokkaliga icon Kempegowda, the founder of modern Bengaluru. However, even Mr. Gandhi met Nirmalanandanath Swami during the Karnataka leg of the Bharat Jodo Yatra.
While the maths of Brahmins and Lingayats are centuries old, other communities have formed their own spiritual centers in recent times to organize themselves. Over the last four decades, other backward classes, many communities in SC and ST blocks, and even many sub-castes within other communities, have come up with their own calculus. These have now emerged as ‘non-partisan’ promoters and arbiters of the interests of the communities. The spread of maths and the fact that political parties are wooing them and recognizing them as representatives of these different communities has only further strengthened the hold of these religious-caste institutions on the public life of the state. MM Kalburgi, who was allegedly assassinated in 2015 by a Hindutva group, described a math as “Paryay Sarkar” (a parallel government).
The power of mathematics comes to the fore from time to time in the political scenario of Karnataka. For example, BJP leaders initially defended the seer of the powerful Veerashaiva-Lingayat Muruga Mutt, who was accused of misbehaving with minor girls in a hostel run by the mutt. Other parties also shy away from speaking on this issue. Though the saint has now been arrested, activists fighting for the victims allege that efforts are being made to derail the case.
In another instance, the state government recently organized a roundtable of saints to decide on the content of moral education in state schools. The two Brahmin math saints who participated in it – Gangadharendra Saraswati Swami and Vishwa Prasanna Tirtha Swami – called for schools to serve only “satvik” food to children. Vishwa Prasanna Tirtha Swami also demanded a ban on the display of meat in the markets. Many saints from communities whose members eat non-vegetarian food did not object to this suggestion at the Round Table Conference. Many of them now also participate in the Virat Hindu Samavchar, which are organized by affiliates of the Sangh Parivar. All these developments indicate how the spread of mathematics among subaltern communities is assisting in the Sanskritisation of many communities.