The much-reified media version of the story about the Lingayat support to the BJP has it that after Lingayat Congress leader Veerendra Patil was unceremoniously ousted as chief minister in 1990 by the then Congress president Rajiv Gandhi, the community shifted its support to the saffron party. Further, according to this version, the community’s support was reinforced under B.S. Yediyurappa in the late 1990s. A closer look at the state’s electoral history, however, shows something different. To say that the community has gradually moved away from the Congress since the ouster of Veerendra Patil and that it has consistently backed the BJP ever since, is to draw hasty conclusions about the complex political sociology of Karnataka.

The community’s support kept alternating between the Congress and the non-Congress much before the alleged humiliation meted out to Veerendra Patil. The Lingayats played a major role in bringing the first non-Congress government to power in Karnataka between 1983-88 under chief minister Ramakrishna Hegde. Long before Yediyurappa emerged on the scene, the Lingayats had rallied around Hegde, a Brahmin. At that time, the Lingayats had been in search of a political leader after Congress chief minister Devaraj Urs (1972-1980) made the tallest Lingayat leader of Karnataka politics S Nijalingappa fade into political oblivion.

The Lingayat anger against the humiliation suffered by Veerendra Patil could have been one of the reasons that saw the Congress biting the dust in the 1994 elections, but the Lingayats did not shift their support to the BJP at once. Veerendra Patil himself stayed back in the Congress till his death. Even a decade after Veerendra Patil’s exit, the Lingayat voters largely backed the Janata Dal and the Congress alternately. The BJP was not their choice. The maximum number of seats that the BJP could get during this period was 40 in 1994 and 44 in 1999, of which more than half came from non-Lingayat dominant regions of the state.

True, the BJP’s 2008 victory was largely because of Lingayat support, but this was neither stable nor was it the result of an organic political mobilisation. The first shift of Lingayat support happened when many prominent Lingayat leaders in erstwhile Janata Dal joined the BJP on the eve of the 2004 assembly elections following the disintegration of the Janata Dal. The next was the result of an eruption of sympathy for Yediyurappa after he was unfairly denied the chief minister’s post under a pact with the Janata Dal (S) in 2007.

In 2013, when Yediyurappa floated a separate regional party, the BJP lost the support of the community. After Yediyurappa rejoined the party the following year, Lingayat support to BJP was only partially restored — the 2018 assembly elections made that clear, as the Congress managed to hold on to a good share of seats in Lingayat-dominated areas. Indeed, the BJP did much better in non-Lingayat areas such as coastal Karnataka where the Other Backward Classes (OBC) votes are decisive, as well as in the central and north-eastern regions dominated by the scheduled tribes.

A section of the Lingayat community is also seriously concerned about the potential of the BJP’s Hindutva ideology weakening Basaveshwara’s philosophy. They have kept the movement for the recognition of Lingayats as a separate religion alive. This movement is a challenge to the BJP which wants to retain the community as a Hindu sect. Some of the heads of the powerful Lingayat Mutts, unlike the seers of Dalits and OBCs, are vocal critics of Hindutva ideology, although over the years the BJP managed to win over several seers to its side. The most prominent among the seers critcal of Hindutva , Nijagunananda Swamiji, draws huge crowds, and the YouTube videos of his discourses attract millions of views, surpassing the hits received by the most vocal pro-Hindutva (and pro-Modi) public speakers. The murder of Prof. M M Kalburgi and Journalist Gowri Lankesh, both Lingayats, allegedly by hardline Hindutva supporters also added to this strained relationship, although not discussed in public.

None of the senior BJP leaders from the Lingayat community, including B S Yediyurappa, joins their party colleagues breathing fire and brimstone against minorities communities. The possible exception is the current chief minister, Basavaraj Bommai, who joined the BJP from the Janata Dal in 2007. However, Bommai’s more-loyal-than-the-king approach could be driven more by his instinct to survive rather than any genuine belief in the BJP’s philosophy. A television anchor recently put it quite succinctly when he said that whenever Bommai spoke in favour of Hindutva it appeared as if he was an amateur theatre actor playing a role that he was not qualified to perform.

Of all its Karnataka leaders whom the BJP groomed over the years and those who have joined it from other parties, the Lingayat leaders seem to have a very fleeting association with its core ideology. This, in a way, explains how a senior BJP leader like Jagadish Shettar, who despite his Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) upbringing walked away with ease and joined the Congress after he was denied a ticket to contest this time.

The BJP’s efforts to capture Karnataka by resorting to extreme forms of Hindutva is, thus, likely to be resisted the most by its Lingayat support-base. The Lingayats are allies of the party as much as they are a thorn in the BJP’s flesh. The current strategy of the BJP, therefore, seems to cultivate non-Lingayat castes to broaden its social base instead of over-relying on the Lingayats, although for the time being, it has no option but to keep the community placated. The party knows only too well that it can win over the community only by keeping it appeased with a larger share in power and not by mesmerising it with its ideology.

A Narayana is a professor of public policy and governance at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru

The views expressed are personal