Once A Commercial Hub, How Hubballi Became The Epicentre Of Communal Politics In Karnataka

In summer, when mangoes are in season, heaps of the famous Alphonso and the freshly harvested local Ishad variety, pile up for sale at Hubballi’s Idgah maidan. From the early 1990s, however, the 1.5-acre patch of land in the city’s heart, known as the Kittur Rani Chennamma maidan, has also been synonymous with a bitter harvest of religious strife. It has taken lives and dwindled the economic fortunes of the city, once called north Karnataka’s commercial capital.

Three decades ago, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) campaign against Babri Masjid in Ayodhya—a small town in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, about 1,700 km north of Hubballi—led to the demolition of the 16th-century mosque. After decades of legal proceedings, the Supreme Court in 2019 allowed the construction of a temple to Rama, the Hindu god, at the site of the erstwhile mosque. The court also allocated land at a different site for the construction of a new mosque.

At the time the Ram Janmabhoomi movement was gaining traction in the late-1980s and early-1990s, the BJP was carrying out a similar campaign in Hubli, as the city was then called. It wanted to raise the national flag at the Idgah maidan. This was the BJP’s vehicle to gain a toehold in the political landscape of Karnataka that, it believed, would allow it to enter south India.

Over the decades, the BJP has not been able to make much headway in the five states in the southern peninsula of the country—Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh. While it currently has a government in Karnataka, its presence in the other states is much smaller than the regional parties. But its campaigns continue.

In August this year, Ganesha, the Hindu god of auspicious beginnings, also made a debut at the maidan, adding to the ground’s history of controversies. It also led to a surge in communal flashpoints across the city, ahead of next year’s state Assembly elections.

Legal fight over the green patch

The maidan was leased in 1921 by the Hubballi-Dharwad City Corporation for 999 years to Anjuman-e-Islam, which claims the allegiance of nearly 130 jamaats. These, in turn, account for 2.56 lakh Muslims living in the municipal area. According to the 2011 Census, 6.36 lakh Hindus also reside within the corporation’s jurisdiction.

According to the lease terms, Anjuman-e-Islam is allowed to use the grounds for prayers twice every year—during Ramazan and Bakri Eid, according to its president Mohammad Yusuf Savanur. This year, amid intense litigation, which led the Dharwad bench of the Karnataka high court to sit in session till around 11 pm on August 30, the BJP-controlled corporation facilitated the celebration of Ganesh Chaturthi for three days at the maidan.

Anjuman-e-Islam had challenged the corporation’s decision, pleading with the court to maintain the sanctity of the site and citing the Places of Worship Act, 1991. The act prohibits “conversion of any place of worship and to provide for the maintenance of the religious character of any place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947”.

“We have been using that land for 200 years,” Savanur tells Outlook. “The court has said that the dignity of the idgah has to be maintained (as per the Places of Worship Act, 1991). This is the position. Why has the corporation’s commiss­ioner taken the wrong step?”

A committee appointed by the corporation to examine the issue received 28 representations in favour of the celebrations at the maidan. Eleven opposed the plan. Despite the object­ions, the civic body permitted Rani Chenna­mma Gajanan Utsav Mahamandal, a social organisation headed by a local Vishva Hindu Parishad leader, to install the Ganesha idol at the controversial site, even as the case was being heard in court. Savanur has now filed a private complaint against the commissioner and is preparing for another judicial battle.

Twins unlike each other

Hubballi and Dharwad are twin cities in north Karnataka. Though twins, they are anything but identical. Dharwad is synonymous with its caramelised milk and sugar pedhas, while Hubballi is known for its extremely spicy Savji cuisine. Located at a height, Dharwad has a cooler clime, Hubballi doesn’t. Dharwad is billed as the cultural capital of Karnataka and was a renowned education hub, while Hubballi was the region’s business and industrial centre. Dharwad was the address for Indian classical music maestros like Mallikarjun Mansur and Gangubai Hangal and has a gharana associated with its name. But by the 1980s, Hubballi had earned a reputation for communal clashes, with indiscriminate street stabbing and ‘cutting’.

In 1992, Murli Manohar Joshi, then BJP president, launched a campaign to unfurl the national flag at Srinagar’s Lal Chowk. Lingaraj Patil, then in his early 30s, was a part of a campaign in Hubballi to replicate Joshi’s experiment at the Idgah maidan. “That year, there were only a handful BJP supporters,” says Patil, who now heads the state BJP’s discip­linary committee. In 1992-93, the district administration denied them permission to unfurl the national flag, citing law and order reasons. “We also took it as a challenge,” Patil tells Outlook. “We sat with all our Sangh Pari­vaar leaders. We asked ourselves: Why can we not hoist the national flag here? There’s a statue of Rani Chennamma right alongside. It belongs in India.”

In 1994, the BJP sent reinforcements to up its game. One of them was then Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Uma Bharti, who, Patil claims, dodged the police radar by dressing as a man when she entered the city. Former Union minister Anant Kumar Hegde, now a Lok Sabha MP from north Karnataka, was then a Bajrang Dal young gun. He led the outfit’s 50-member aahuti (sacrifice) brigade, which had planned to “fight till the end” if their mission to unfurl the flag on Independence Day failed. They hid in Patil’s apartment, located just one tall wall away from the maidan. Patil, Hegde and others then breached the wall. While one group distracted the police, Hedge and the others rushed to the heart of the maidan and hoisted the Tricolour. “Our group took a beating because we distract­­ed the police force, while Hedge and some protestors hoisted the national flag. Once they did that, they started singing the national anthem, after which the police also could not do anything,” Patil says.

Patil’s business office is located in the city’s leafy avenue near Gujarat Bhavan, less than 100 metres from a plaque that honours the six Hindu activists who were killed in police firing and violence during Bharti’s visit to Hubballi to bolster the flag-hoisting campaign.

Galaata is a Kannada word commonly used to articulate a wide gamut of troubles, right from a street fight to riots. Patil, too, uses the word often in the course of the interview. But he also concedes that such galaatas in Hubballi helped the party reap a good political harvest in Karnataka. “The Idgah issue gave us a big boost. We were the opposition party at that time. Our organisational reach also increased at the same time on the basis of Hindutva. The more the Congress tried to suppress us, the more our numbers swelled. There was an ‘anti’ sentiment against the Congress,” he says. “The BJP had no MLAs in the Hubballi-Dharwad region before the Idgah controversy. Now, out of the seven assembly constituencies in the district, the BJP has five MLAs, while the Congress has only two,” says Amaregouda Gonwar, a senior journalist who writes for Udayavani, a popular Kannada newspaper.

A siege at the maidan

A few weeks since the controversies over the Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations in August, the political buzz surrounding the Idgah ground has simmered down somewhat. The gates to the paved maidan are now locked and police pickets guard its periphery.

The maidan itself is ringed by a market, commercial complexes, and several popular landmarks. There’s the colourful Sai temple and statues of Rani Chennamma and her comm­ander Sangolli Rayanna, who was hanged to death by the British in 1831.

In another open area adjoining the maidan, excavators furiously dig out earth to make way for the foundation of a commercial parking plaza. A few hundred metres from the maidan, a restaurant named Ayodhya seems to reinforce Uttar Pradesh’s Hindutva synergy with Hubballi.

But a few 100 metres further from Ayodhya, a tall, disused industrial chimney screams for attention. The chimney stands on a deserted plot. It is the only obvious remnant of a textile mill.

Like Mumbai, Hubballi was a thriving centre for processing cotton, the main crop in the nearby districts. Traditional textile mills in both cities were phased out in the 1990s due to labour disputes, changing clothing trends, and the failure of their management to keep up with technological innovations. Until the formation of the Karnataka state, Hubballi was a part of the Bombay Presidency. To date, Hubballi, Dharwad and other areas in north Karnataka are still referred to as Bombay-Karnataka. The decline of industry and businesses in Hubballi coincided with spurts of communal violence in the 1980s and 1990s.

While communal outbursts had faded from public memory, 2022 marked a spurt in such incidents. On April 17, an incendiary, doctored WhatsApp video, allegedly posted on social media by two students, Abhishek Hiremath and Veerabhadra Patil, casting slurs on a Muslim place of worship, lit another communal powder keg in the city.

While the duo was arrested, nearly 150 Muslims, including an All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen civic corporator, were also booked, after they allegedly pelted stones and damaged police cars parked outside the Old Hubballi police station, protesting the contents of the video. More than a dozen police personnel, including a police inspector, were hurt as a result of the violence.

An uneasy calm

A month later, there is a seeming calm in the vicinity of the police station, which is located near the dargah of a local Muslim saint, Sayyed Fateh Shah Wali. But it does not take much to scratch the surface. A tender-coconut seller plying his wares opposite the police station was curiously aggressive to know why this correspondent took photos of the religious structure and the police station in tandem.

It took two days of shared meals and multiple long rides in an auto-rickshaw for its driver to confide that he felt fishy about this correspondent taking photographs of several religious sites in the city. The sense of suspicion and distrust is evident. So are rumours about communal business practices of the “other” in town. “They do not want to sit in our autos. They scan autos and drivers for their own religious symbols, before stepping in for the ride,” says the same auto driver, who did not want to be named.

While the communal cloud of the 1980s and 1990s took a toll on Hubballi’s businesses, a fresh round of flight of capital would land a telling blow on the town, says Pandurang Patil, who has served as mayor on two occasions. “If that (communal violence) is repeated, Hubballi will die. Hubballi could be rebuilt because those (incidents) had stopped. (But) if these small incidents happen, Hubballi tends to become scared,” he says.

But amid the recurring religious ferment in the region, there are some calming vignettes too. As he has for a decade, this year too, police inspector Jakeer Pasha Mohammed Sab Kalimirchi led a Ganesh Chaturthi procession from the Gokul Road police station, where he is currently posted.

Kalimirchi, a Muslim, belongs to a Mangalore village in Koppal district, around 100 km from Hubballi. The region is known for its Sufi moorings, where Hindus, Muslims and Catholics collectively worship at Sufi saint Malangshah’s dargah. “Koppal is known for Sufi saints. Here, people believe that whether one is Muslim, Hindu or Christian, nothing is bigger than humanity. In our village we celebrate all festivals together, irrespective of our religious orientation,” he tells Outlook. “In my house, religion is personal. Whether I wear a topi, apply vibhuti or bhasma, when I step out of home I am an Indian,” he adds.

(This appeared in the print edition as "A Bitter Harvest")

(Views expressed are personal)