The poster boys of two of the most communally polarising initiatives undertaken by Karnataka’s BJP government have faced contrasting fates in ticket distribution for the upcoming Assembly polls.
Yashpal Suvarna, who was the face of the anti-hijab campaign that started from a government college in Udupi and led to a statewide ban on the headscarf in educational institutions, has been rewarded with a ticket from Udupi by supplanting incumbent MLA Raghupathi Bhat. But Goolihatty D. Shekar, who had raked up the proselytisation issue to get the government to order a hugely controversial survey on churches, has been left out.
In equally contrasting reactions, Bhat has reconciled to his destiny and the party’s decision after shedding tears at being denied renomination, Shekar has resigned from the BJP and is likely to contest as an Independent.
On December 27, 2021, the Government Pre-University College in Udupi disallowed a bunch of Muslim students from entering the classrooms wearing the religious headscarf.
The college committee headed by the local MLA, with Suvarna as its vice-president, had refused to budge even though the students and their parents agreed to use the dupatta, which is part of the uniform, to cover their heads instead of the hijab.
While Bhat tried to seek a compromise formula, Suvarna struck a hardline stand by declaring that “India will be the first country to ban hijab and halal”. Suvarna eventually prevailed.
Six Muslim students have since spent the rest of the academic year sitting outside their classrooms and borrowing notes from their classmates.
The government in February last year issued an order empowering schools to prescribe uniforms for their students and banning the hijab. After hearing the students, Karnataka High Court had in March 2022 upheld the ban on the hijab in classrooms on the ground that wearing the headscarf was not part of the essential religious practices in Islam. The students’ appeals are now pending before the Supreme Court.
Shekar, who represents the Hosadurg Assembly constituency, had in October 2021 raised the issue of “illegal conversions” by citing the example of his mother who had embraced Christianity before he organised a ritual at a temple to bring her and eight others back to the fold of Hinduism.
A strong advocate of an anti-conversion law, Shekar even got the BJP-dominated Karnataka Legislative Committee on Backward Classes and Minorities Welfare to order a survey on churches, sparking fear and anguish among Christians and the clergy. Shekar had chaired the committee meeting where the order was issued.
Congress leader and then member of the committee, P.R. Ramesh, said the treatment meted out to Shekar should be a lesson for others in the BJP. “Those who get over-enthusiastic about the BJP’s divide-and-rule policy must learn how the party uses its own leaders before dumping them in the dustbin,” Ramesh told The Telegraph on Friday.
Ramesh was among the Opposition members who had strongly objected to the church survey order. “It is the same divisive ideology that has made them pick Suvarna, who we all know was the loudest of the voices during the hijab row. He campaigned hard to get the hijab banned from campuses. But there will be a time when even he will be discarded like Shekar,” Ramesh said.
Ansar Ahmed, Udupi district president of the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike, a social organisation that works for protecting the interests of the state, said Suvarna had been rewarded for his role in the hijab controversy.
“Left to the MLA (Bhat), he would have sorted out the issue in a few days. But Suvarna was adamant and insisted on banning the hijab from classrooms,” Ahmed told this newspaper.
