Over the past two years, there have been a series of murders in coastal Karnataka and more than 114 communal clashes across the state. In Mangalore, Sanghi fascists continue to engage in violence with impunity, much as they did during the BJP rule.
Published Jun 06, 2025 | 8:00 AM ⚊ Updated Jun 06, 2025 | 8:00 AM
The Mangaluru City Corporation
Synopsis: In denying what was plainly visible and the horrific reality experienced by ordinary people as untrue, and in normalising cruelty, the role of middle-class intellectuals living in comfort zones in Nazi Germany – with their pretentious decency and well-educated civility – was significant. Above all, the way they alienated their fellow human beings, excluded them from their moral universe, and made civil society accept, even support, the massacres, is terrifying. Today in India, the same politics of massacre and cannibalism is gaining legitimacy within society.
In coastal Karnataka, fascist violence perpetrated by the Sanghis – and the retaliatory violence it has provoked – has continued unabated, even after the Congress returned to power.
Over the past two years, there have been a series of murders in the coastal region and more than 114 communal clashes across the state. In Mangalore, Sanghi fascists continue to engage in violence with impunity, much as they did during the BJP rule.
As this violence has escalated, Karnataka’s civil society has begun to voice strong dissatisfaction, and Muslim members and leaders within the Congress have resigned en masse.
Seemingly spurred by this unrest, the Congress government, after making some administrative changes, has announced that it has initiated exile measures against workers from Sangh-affiliated organisations as well as Muslim groups involved in ongoing communal hate campaigns.
Yet, at the same time, show-cause notices have been issued to leaders who spoke out against these actions.
Notably, the exile list does not prominently feature many of the provocative leaders from the Muslim community.
This is because, among Muslim organisations and leaders, not only those deemed dangerous by the government, but also the majority who oppose Sanghi ideology, have already been arrested and imprisoned on various charges.
Consequently, the current exile list mostly comprises lower-level Muslim leaders – presumably included to give the government’s actions a veneer of balance.
Yet, with the exception of AK Puthila, the senior and predominantly upper-caste leaders of the Sangh Parivar – those who have been continuously setting the entire coastal region alight – are notably absent from the exile list. Take, for instance, Kalladka Prabhakar Bhat.
Moreover, factional politics within the Sangh Parivar itself appear to have influenced the Congress’s list. Consequently, the government’s current actions feel like too little, too late.
Nonetheless, civil society must maintain constant vigilance and pressure to ensure that this measure is carried through to a genuine and meaningful conclusion.
More than the Congress party or even progressive organisations, it is the Sangh Parivar – with its deep roots among the people of the coastal region – that may portray even this half-hearted step by the Congress government as anti-Hindu and use it as a pretext to descend into street violence.
It is already evident that the Congress in Coastal Karnataka lacks the will either to confront this on the streets or to politically push back.
Therefore, the exile may end up shielding most Sanghis from punishment – or worse, provide an opportunity for communalism to extend its reach.
Therefore, although the exile measure is welcome, the Congress’s commitment to it fails to inspire confidence.
Nor will the exile of just 22 individuals uproot Sanghi fascism in the coastal region.
Communal clashes in the coastal region, or indeed across the country, are no longer, as they were in the 1980s, the result of misunderstandings or temporary prejudices that flare up briefly before subsiding.
Instead, they have evolved into a fascism that depicts another community as a permanent enemy and seeks to establish a Brahminical Hindu Rashtra in opposition to the Republic of India.
Its roots have penetrated the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, as well as the media, and, above all, public consciousness.
Over the past century, the Sangh Parivar has systematically sown the seeds of Hindutva hatred, constructing a Hindutva society.
This hate-fuelled society is gradually enveloping the entire Hindu community, choosing the Hindu Rashtra through elections.
That is why not only so-called secular parties, but even genuinely secular ones, struggle to breathe when it comes to defeating Sanghi parties at the ballot box – unless they first build a strong democratic society.
Without creating such a democratic society and the democratic state that underpins it, fascism cannot be defeated by law or elections alone.
For the ruling-class parties other than the BJP, including the Congress, there may be electoral rivalry with the BJP but no fundamental opposition to fascist politics.
As a result, the legal measures they take remain weak – and have always been so.
Viewed in this light, the purpose of legal measures, arrests, and punishments is to instil a fear of consequences in those who commit crimes.
Yet, whether under a Congress government or a BJP administration, no effective steps have been taken to instil such fear in those who foment communal violence.
Instead, those who have incited communal riots have been promoted to positions as MLAs and ministers. The previous and current Congress governments are no less culpable in this regard.
Apart from a handful of retiring secular leaders within the coastal Congress, the majority of current leaders are ideologically aligned with the Sanghis.
Most Congress leaders in the coastal region do not contest elections without the endorsement of Sanghi maths. Moreover, many wealthy businessmen from the Muslim community engage in joint ventures with senior Sangh Parivar leaders.
As politics and economics are thus deeply intertwined, even though the Congress government came to power in 2023, Speaker Khader invited openly declared well-wishers of the fascist Sanghis to bestow their blessings.
Despite ongoing allegations and investigations against BJP Rajya Sabha member Veerendra Heggade, the Congress Chief Minister and Deputy Chief Ministers have gone to receive his blessings.
Meanwhile, the Congress state president shamelessly proclaims that there are ‘a thousand DK Shivakumars’ ready to protect him.
If the legislature is in such a state, the judiciary, too, has recently been openly delivering judgments biased towards Hindutva. The hegemony of Hindutva has spread firmly from the Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court down to judges in lower-level Sessions Courts.
That is why, for the same accusation, while some are charged with sedition and endure years of imprisonment without trial, Sanghi activists accused of identical offences are acquitted and released.
Even without evidence, the judiciary has ordered the Babri Masjid to be converted into the Ram Mandir and the Bababudangiri Dargah to become a half-temple, merely on the basis that Hindus form the majority. Yet, the same judiciary refuses to recognise religious faith when it comes to the wearing of the hijab.
It remains to be seen how the Modi government’s encroachment on Waqf properties will be handled. Precisely because of this Hindutva dominance over the judiciary, no matter how much hate speech coastal Sangh leader Kalladka Prabhakar Bhat delivers, the courts do not take suo motu action against him.
Even when the government files cases, his arrest is never ordered. This is why the Republic of India continues to lose ground before what might be called the Republic of Kalladka.
The most alarming aspect of fascism is its ability to spread lies and delusions, take root among oppressed communities, and transform them into instruments of its own hatred.
Therefore, the heartfelt grief expressed without hesitation by a few Hindu neighbours over Rahman’s murder, and the regret voiced by the priest of Tekkaru temple in response to BJP MLA Poonja’s statement targeting the Muslim community, offer faint flickers of hope.
How did the undivided Dakshina Kannada – once, until the 1970s, a bastion of progressive and socialist thought and movements, and a major beneficiary of successful land reform – end up becoming a laboratory for Hindutva after facing the twin onslaughts of globalisation and Hindutva in the 1980s and ’90s?
How has the BJP steadily expanded its electoral support base since the 1990s? How much of this is due to changes in the economy? How much to the weakness of progressive forces?
And how much stems from the opportunism of parties such as the Congress?
Now, with all this in mind, how can a harmonious coastal region be rebuilt?
Is it achievable through a handful of arrests and a few exiles? Through the Congress? Through elections?
The real question now is whether we are at least capable of recognising the true face of the enemy.
History shows us that even when Hitler and Mussolini had already given clear signs of their Nazi-fascist ambitions, the world paid a heavy price for refusing to see them.
In denying what was plainly visible and the horrific reality experienced by ordinary people as untrue, and in normalising cruelty, the role of middle-class intellectuals living in comfort zones in Nazi Germany – with their pretentious decency and well-educated civility – was significant.
Above all, the way they alienated their fellow human beings, excluded them from their moral universe, and made civil society accept, even support, the massacres, is terrifying.
Today in India, the same politics of massacre and cannibalism is gaining legitimacy within society.
For example, BBC reporter Fergal Keane, who covered the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994, later wrote a book about it titled Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey.
In it, he describes the processes that unfolded before over a million people were killed in a hundred days as follows:
“In my journey through Rwanda I encountered many of the killers… a few gave the appearance of being truly psychopathic individuals. The mass of others were ragged and illiterate peasants, easily roused to hatred of the Tutsis.
“Perhaps the most sinister people I met were the educated political elite – men and women of charm and sophistication who spoke flawless French and could engage in long philosophical debates about the nature of war and democracy.
“But they shared one thing in common with the soldiers and peasants: they were drowning in the blood of their fellow countrymen.”
The polished debates conducted by elite figures and the TV anchors they watch about the violence committed by Sanghis only serve to put to shame the pretentious civility of Rwanda’s middle class.
But how do such uncivilised, inhuman massacres ever gain the approval of the majority?
Historical sociologist and professor Helen Fein – who specialised in genocide, human rights, and collective violence, and conducted in-depth studies of such massacres worldwide – offers the following explanation:
“Genocides or other forms of mass violence do not occur suddenly or by accident. They follow a process that creates a social context of hatred and fear. This continues until people are removed from the universe of moral obligation in the public mind.”
This imagined hatred, fear, and social prejudice foster the mental state and justifications necessary to deny others the moral responsibility we naturally extend to our own.
This alienation and othering of fellow human beings does not occur suddenly. Professor Gregory Stanton of the United States, who has conducted extensive research on genocides, identifies ten stages through which a society passes before reaching the climax of genocide:
These stages may appear sequential, or several may unfold simultaneously.
In Modi-era Indian society, and in coastal Karnataka in particular, all ten processes are advancing at an alarming pace.
They are brutalising civil society – alienating Muslims, delegitimising Dalit and Shudra communities – and conducting cultural-political genocides.
The way such politics transform human beings into murderous machines is vividly explained by journalist and scholar Hannah Arendt in her study.
She particularly describes how a Nazi commander named Adolf Eichmann was able to carry out the mass killing of thousands of Jews with chilling, indifferent detachment.
“What makes Eichmann so disturbing is that there are thousands like him out there.
“And most of them are not mentally deranged. Nor are they sadists. Many such people, then and now, exist in a condition that is frighteningly normal.
“From the perspective of our legal institutions and the conclusions of our moral standards, this normality is far more terrifying than the overall horror of all the atrocities they committed,” she concludes.
Eichmann was responsible for organising the logistical preparations required for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews.
After Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, he fled with thousands of other Nazis to Argentina, where he lived quietly as a respectable householder.
In 1960, however, Israel’s Mossad tracked him down, abducted him, and brought him to Israel. Over the course of two years, his trial was conducted, culminating in a death sentence in 1962.
Arendt, who reported on the trial, was struck by Eichmann’s “indifferent detachment” throughout the proceedings and his complete absence of remorse for the genocides in which he played a part.
This led her to study the mental state of such murderers – those who participate in massacres yet maintain a disturbing emotional detachment.
“Even after the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people, how is such mechanical detachment possible for human beings?
“How was it possible for them to commit inhuman atrocities and still live as normal human beings without even a trace of guilt?”
She explores these questions in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. The above passages are excerpts from this work.
It is by eroding the sensitivity of natural human compassion and empathy, and through false doctrines and hateful narratives, that they create within people either a disturbing indifference or active murderousness towards the cruelty unfolding before their eyes.
This is the greatest challenge fascism poses to civilisation. It dehumanises both the sacrificial victims and the perpetrators alike.
India, and Karnataka in particular, face such a grave challenge. For a hundred years, the Sanghis have steadily turned Indians into murderers through their hateful ideology.
Therefore, if we are to rebuild an India founded on equality and harmony, a dedicated struggle of at least 25 to 30 years is necessary – without illusions about the Congress, the judiciary, or elections.
We must place trust in the dormant humanity within people, with faith in the course of history.
In that direction, at least now, one must commit. That is all.
(The writer is an an activist and a columnist based in Bengaluru. Translated from Kannada and edited by Dese Gowda)
