Right-wing extremists ambushed a car near Moodbidri town in the Mangaluru area on October 9 and insulted the driver and three-woman passengers. The guys were enraged because the car’s owner, a Muslim, and his wife travelled with two Hindu ladies. A case of unlawful assembly, rioting, inciting hatred between groups on religious grounds, wrongful restraint, sexual harassment, assault of a woman, public damage, and criminal intimidation was filed based on the complaint.
The Congress party in Karnataka questioned the MLA’s attendance at the police station the next day on social media, claiming that the BJP administration in the state is complicit in the growing frequency of such events in the state. When queried about the accusation during a visit to the Mangaluru area on Wednesday, Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai explained incidences of moral policing as simply reactions to societal conditions rather than unlawful vigilantism, citing the October 9 Moodbidri incident as an example.
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In the aftermath of another instance of moral policing in Bengaluru on September 17, when two Muslim vigilantes beat up a Hindu guy for bringing a Muslim lady colleague home after work, Bommai took a different stance on social media. “My administration takes such occurrences very seriously,” he said after the culprits were apprehended within 24 hours.
Right-wing Hindutva organizations use polarisation methods to keep their support base intact. According to police sources, they become encouraged if the BJP is in power in the state and is perceived as being light on vigilantism by right-wing groups. According to police authorities, when the BJP is in power in Karnataka, the pendulum swings in favor of the right-wing, but when other parties are in power, the pendulum swings in favor of Muslim organizations and others.
The coastal Karnataka area was enflamed with racial sentiments in the run-up to the 2018 state Assembly elections. The Congress party was in power, with every second crime getting communal overtones as the BJP attempted to polarise groups to win votes in the region.
When the BJP initially came to power in Karnataka in 2008, the early years were marked by a series of communal events, including an attack on churches in Mangaluru in 2008, an attack on women at a bar in 2009, and an attack on a birthday celebration at a home-stay facility in 2013. Due to serious infighting, corruption, and a crackdown on people involved in moral policing events like the home-stay attack, hard-core right-wing organizations in Mangaluru had a falling out with the BJP by the 2013 elections.
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Bommai, who took office in July after Yediyurappa stepped down, is currently balancing a tightrope act to maintain favor with the various forces involved in keeping the BJP in power in Karnataka, including radical outfits, and has been seen as soft-pedaling vigilantism, which is seen as crucial to the BJP vote bank in communally polarised regions of the state – though there are fears that it may now spread to other parts as well.
