Lingayat reactionSiddaramaiah also faced embarrassment when 30 Lingayat MLAs urged him to reject the report. It was also signed by Congress ministers in his cabinet, including M B Patil, Shivananda Patil and Eshwar Khandre. Congress MLA Shamanuru Shivashankarappa, who heads the Veerashaiva Mahasabha, also expressed opposition to the report. A veteran Congressman, Shivashankarappa, who will turn 94 this June, is the senior-most MLA in the present Karnataka Assembly. He hails from Davanagere in the Central Karnataka region, which has a large Lingayat population. His son S S Mallikarjun is a minister in Siddaramaiah’s cabinet.The Mahasabha demanded a re-survey. Shivashankarappa recently told reporters that the Kantharaju/Hegde report is based on 10-year-old data. “We are estimating there are over two crore people from the Lingayat community and we will conduct a survey from our Mahasabha. With the help of Vokkaligas and Brahmins, we are going to fight it. We do not accept this report,” he said. He went on to claim that his community (Lingayat) is distraught. “Things were better when J H Patel and S Nijalingappa were chief ministers,” he told the media. The Mahasabha meanwhile is also demanding a Deputy CM post for their community.The backgroundIt was during his first tenure as chief minister between 2013 and 2018 that Siddaramaiah had commissioned the survey. The then chairman of KSCBC, H Kantharaju, had prepared his report in 2018. But it was neither accepted nor made public. When Kantharaju’s term as chairman ended, the short-lived BJP government (May 17-23, 2018) appointed Jayaprakash Hegde as his successor. Hegde’s tenure ended on February 28, the day he submitted the report to the state government.Siddaramaiah had earlier accused H D Kumaraswamy who was heading the Congress-JD(S) coalition government, of dragging his feet on the report during his watch as chief minister from May 23, 2018 to July 23, 2019.Since 1947, Karnataka (including Mysuru State) has seen 22 CMs, some of whom served as CM more than once. Of them, 15 of them are from the Lingayat and Vokkaliga communities (8 Lingayats and 7 Vokkaligas). Both the Congress and the BJP fielded many Vokkaligas and Lingayats for the 2023 Assembly polls and most of them won. In 1990, when the Congress high command forced M Veerendra Patil, one of the prominent Lingayat leaders, to resign as chief minister, the community took it personally and moved away from the grand old party. With their representation reduced as per the latest census report, community members fear losing their representation politically as well. Not just in the cabinet, many of the boards and Corporations are headed by members of these two communities.During his first term as chief minister, Siddaramaiah had proposed a separate religion tag for Lingayats and secured the cabinet’s approval. But it was widely opposed by many seers within the community as well as the Opposition BJP. In fact, it caused damage to the party in 2018, reducing the share of Congress MLAs in the assembly.
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