THE LAST TIME EVENTS IN COASTAL Karnataka became the focus of intense media attention was in February 2009, when a gang of young men belonging to the Sri Rama Sene (SRS), a right-wing Hindu group, stormed into a pub in Mangaluru shouting the ‘Jai Sri Ram’ slogan and savagely booted out young women who were having a drink. Pramod Muthalik, the head of the SRS, proudly took responsibility for the shameful attack and justified it, saying, “We are the custodians of Indian culture.” Thirteen years later, in early February 2022, visuals of bedlam in several colleges of Udupi district and other districts of Karnataka were streamed into people’s living rooms through television news channels and viral videos filled social media. The visuals showed college students—boys and girls—wearing saffron shawls and/or pethas (turbans) and screaming ‘Jai Sri Ram’ confronting smaller groups of Muslim girls in burkha (a long, loose garment covering the whole body) or hijab (headscarf). Saffron-clad youth intimidated young girls, defining the boundaries of Hindutva’s cultural nationalism through dress codes for women, and consequently, drawing a line between the insider and outsider. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led State government blatantly stood on the side of Hindu right-wing organisations as government colleges shut their gates on hijab – clad Muslim girls. The state’s message was plain and clear: If Muslim girls wanted to access public education, they would have to conform and leave their hijabs at home; they did not have a choice. In 2009, the girls at the pub were targeted because they were behaving ‘immodestly’; ironically, in 2022, girls were targeted for clinging to a piece of cloth that, in their opinion, protected their modesty in accordance with Islamic strictures. In both instances, the message was clear: do not cross the thin wedge of territory defined by Hindutva and any one crossing that imagined boundary will be treated as the ‘other’ in India’s mainstream. With the state’s frontal role in 2022, the difference between the fringe and the centre of Hindu nationalist politics (represented by the BJP, which is in power at the Centre and in Karnataka) has ceased in the 13 years since 2009.
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