The demand of Lingayats for a separate religious tag, delinked from the Veerashaiva Hindu faith, is shrouded in political intrigue. Even as Hindutva’s aggressive adherents find themselves in a dilemma, the Congress hopes to gain electorally from fuelling the demand.
THE numerically and politically strong Lingayat community of Karnataka has always had a paradoxical relationship with the Hindu faith, but its demand to be recognised as a separate religion, at a time when the State is scheduled for Assembly elections in months to come, has serious religious and political ramifications.
The community, which has a dominant presence in northern Karnataka, has been the trusted vote bank of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for about two decades. In fact, it has been the saffron party’s battering ram to make inroads into Karnataka in particular and southern India in general.
Lingayats have been assiduously wooed by Hindutva advocates, but for at least half a century now the community’s leaders have been persistent in their demand that it be recognised as a separate religion outside the Hindu fold. Herein lies a dilemma for the champions of Hindutva: how to maintain the community’s separate identity after aggressively homogenising it within a monolithic vision of what constitutes Hinduism.
The current controversy has its roots in the massive gathering of Lingayats on July 20 in Bidar town to demand legal status for their community as a separate religion. The rally assumed importance not just because of the numerical strength of the gathering and its timing but its insistence that Lingayats and Veerashaivas, together classified in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category and used synonymously for all administrative purposes, constitute different faiths. The protesters insisted that Lingayats, the “true followers” of the 12th-century social reformer Basaveshwara (Basavanna/Basava), constituted a separate religion, while Veerashaivas were no more than a sect of the Hindu Saivite faith.
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