Karnataka today is a fractured land. Its politics and polity and its people are riven by caste and religion. The atmosphere is vitiated by constant communal tensions and poisoned by divisive ideologies. Irrelevant, emotive issues -- the senseless hijab controversy, denigrating Tipu Sultan, or whether Lingayats are Hindus, rewriting history and painting it saffron or green -- not essential to development or propitious for the flowering of culture and the arts, have come to dominate our lives.
Rampant and brazen corruption has tarnished the reputation of the state. Frequent change of governments has not improved the infrastructure or quality of governance. Bengaluru resembles a bombed city, dug up everywhere, with piles up garbage and water woes. It is now known internationally for traffic snarls and interminable delays, and its depleting green cover.
Yet, it remains a lodestar attracting migrant workers from across India and still draws the brightest young minds seeking jobs or to build start-ups. Investors in the IT sector prefer Bengaluru to other cities. It has a plethora of engineering colleges and a rich ecosystem for innovation; Kannadigas are genial and hospitable by nature, and the city is cosmopolitan, offering art, culture and music for all tastes.
Bengaluru is avant-garde (think three-time Grammy winner Ricky Kej), and it boasts of a great evening social life with lively pubs and gourmet and fashionable eating places. Above all, the city is conducive to entrepreneurs and has produced iconic ones, and thus has the largest number of start-ups and unicorns.
Karnataka -- and Bengaluru, in particular -- is in danger of losing all of the above. No business can prosper and no development is possible without peace and communal harmony. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Trade is a plant which will grow wherever there is peace, as soon as there is peace and as long as there is peace.”
We don’t have to look Western thinkers, though. Karnataka can learn lessons from its own great writers and thinkers from the ancient past to recent times.
Adi Kavi Pampa, a Jain born in the Chalukyan era a thousand years ago near Gadag in North Karnataka, said, “The humans are one caste. That is the only truth.” Sri Vijaya’s Kavirajamarga, the first available work in Kannada, a treatise on poetics and grammar from the 8th century, says, “The confluence of diverse ideas and religions is gold.” Basavanna, born to a Brahmin family, the founder of the Lingayat community, among the greatest reformers of India who rejected caste, social discrimination, violence, superstitions, and rituals and sought to unite everyone, and who can be placed alongside Buddha, said, “Where is caste, what is caste, he who wishes good to all living beings belongs to the highest caste.”
Kanaka Dasa, the saint-poet of the 15th century, born a shepherd, memorably admonished, “Don’t keep fighting about your caste. Do any of you know your origins?” Poet Sarvagna, a household name, said, “There are a myriad learnings and professions. The knowledge and profession of the plough is the most superior.” Purandara Dasa, revered as the “father of Carnatic music”, exposed the hypocrisy of rituals and extolled good actions in life over everything else.
Karnataka’s Sufi poets were philosophers who transcended caste and religion and saw humanity as one indivisible entity. Govinda Bhatta, a Brahmin scholar, was the guru of Shishunala Sharifa, the much-loved social reformer and poet of North Karnataka. When the local Mullah heard that Sharifa had become Bhatta’s disciple, he asked him, “Why have you stopped coming to the mosque?” Sharifa replied, pointing to his body, “I dwell in this mosque, so why go and come! I’m in constant worship.” He was the living embodiment of sarva dharma samabhava.
Poet-laureate Kuvempu, who belonged to the farming community of Gowdas, who wrote the epic Ramayana Darshanam in Kannada in poetic form, said, “I have no caste and so I hate no caste. I belong to the religion of humanity, the universal man (Vishwa Manava). D R Bendre, another of Kannada literature’s Jnanapith luminaries, wrote in one of his most celebrated poems, “I am poor. He is poor. Love is our life.” Love is all. Love unites.
Jedara Dasimayya, a 11th century seer of the Devanga weaver community, was far ahead of his times. Deeply devout but liberal in his outlook, he saw the divine in all beings. In one of his vachanas (aphorisms), he says: “If one has bosom and tresses, they call one a woman/If one has moustache and beard, they call one a man/The soul that hovers in between is neither man nor woman.
Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Dalit activists and rebels, and numerous women writers have all enriched the pluralistic ethos, culture, arts and literature of Karnataka. These great writers -- from Pampa, Ranna, Kumaravyasa, to Kuvempu, D V Gundappa, Bendre, Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, U R Ananthamurthy, Girish Karnad, Nissar Ahmed, Na D’Souza, Chandrashekhara Kambara, Devanur Mahadeva, Baragur Ramachandrappa, and from Akka Mahadevi to Triveni and Vydehi, and many more -- from the ancient times to the present, all had one thing in common. Their compassion for humanity, their celebration of love in its many splendoured facets, their quest for truth and beauty, their pantheistic vision lifted them above the ordinary, though they were all rooted in their soil and milieu and nurtured by the precepts of their religion and its offshoots, and even as some clung to their orthodoxies in their private lives and others were iconoclastic.
From those lofty heights, Karnataka has descended into the abyss of ugly and venal politics. BJP leaders openly declare that a Lingayat will be made Chief Minister; the Gowdas get upset and the Opposition woos them; the BJP counters by demonising Muslims and snatches their 4% quota and gives it to the Gowdas and Lingayats to appease them. The others -- Dalits, tribals, numerous backward communities, and the amorphous teeming jobless youth -- are relegated and forgotten.
The Opposition does not know how to counter the BJP’s Hindutva agenda and is handicapped because of its own poor governance and corruption record earlier. And the people are on the horns of a dilemma.
Abstaining from voting is not an option, and cynicism is not the answer. People must go out and vote. ‘Double-engine’ government or ‘single-engine’ government will not make a difference if communal harmony and peace is not restored and corruption-free governance is not delivered.
When faced with a hard choice on whom to vote for when all choices are bad, choose the lesser evil.
(The writer is a soldier, farmer and entrepreneur)