In the chaos of Karnataka politics, the BJP much like its peers has been unable to make a mark after the assembly elections. In the months after the elections, the party lost its tallest leader, former Union Minister Ananth Kumar. Ananth Kumar was known for his political acumen and had the exceptional ability to get things done. The more prominent face in the Karnataka BJP, BS Yeddyurappa, isn’t the effective administrator and the political Chanakya that he used to be ten years ago. Murmurs of a second ‘Operation Lotus’ keep surfacing every few weeks, but for some reason, it hasn’t been taken to its logical conclusion.
In these trying circumstances, Union Minister of State Ananth Kumar Hegde has emerged as a young leader to reckon with. Although he might not be as big a political heavyweight as many other leaders in Karnataka currently, Hegde has displayed all the traits of a mass leader. His ability to set the agenda instead of reacting to it is the most important trait. Moreover, he does not care for the judgement that the Lutyens media or the Khan Market Consensus pass on him. His sense of self-assuredness, that he is taking up issues that matter to the people on the ground and could not care less about the approval of pseudo opinion makers, sets him apart from the rest. It allows him to be as politically incorrect as he wants to be. Of course, this is a long-term high-stakes game, but then again, isn’t it tried and tested? Ask Yogi. Ask Balasaheb. Ask Trump.
Here are five instances of politically incorrect statements of the Karnataka leader that the Lutyens media made a fuss about, like uptight cry-babies:
1. “Secular people don’t know their parental blood.”
Ouch! This must have hurt the cabal so bad. The cabal’s secularism begins with minority appeasement and ends with undermining Hindus and Hinduism. The minister’s attack was at the very basis of this pseudo-construct, India’s supposed peaceful and syncretic culture. This lie that the cabal has based itself on, whitewashing or ignoring large parts of India’s history and the brutality we underwent, is what the minister indicated while talking of parental blood. The discourse of the last seventy years has made many of us immune to what our ancestors and our culture went through. The Kannadigas know this better than anyone.
2. “The so-called intellectuals don’t understand ‘antar atma’… these people think fulfilling the needs of the human body is what life is all about.”
How very true. An entire ecosystem of useful idiots was cultivated for decades because greedy morons are found in abundance. Cheerleaders of a particular party, family, and ideology were given plump posts, foreign junkets, national awards, funding, and God alone knows what else. If institutions like the media, the intelligentsia, and the academia were not politically driven, they wouldn’t have touched many of these nincompoops with a ten-foot pole. It was purely a transactional relationship, because as the minister rightly said, for them, life was all about fulfilling the needs of the human body.
3. “We are here to change the Constitution.”
This statement was made by Ananth Kumar Hegde in the context of the word ‘secular’ in the preamble of the Indian Constitution, and the minister hinted that it would be removed someday. The usual suspects were up in arms, but this statement managed to expose them completely. The fact of the matter is that the word ‘secular’ did not exist in the original preamble of the constitution. For obvious reasons, these cheerleaders on hire never had an issue with the preamble being meddled with in the first place. This exposed their hypocrisy, and the extent of their slavish mindsets threadbare.
4. “A father who is a Muslim, a mother who is a Christian and the son is supposed to be a Brahmin. How is that even possible? You will not find such a hybrid specimen in any laboratory across the world.”
Ananth Hegde said this in the context of Rahul Gandhi, who is a self-proclaimed Janeudhari Brahmin. Although the claim that his father was a Muslim is unsubstantiated, questions about whether he is really a Janeudhari Brahmin have been raised by certain sections. This, of course, does not include the lapdog media and intelligentsia, which has taken Rahul’s words at face value and accepted them. In other democracies such as the United States, when politicians make questionable statements about their origins, they are constantly under public scrutiny. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris are good examples. But back home, the discourse is so one-sided that certain claims are hardly ever scrutinized. The fourth estate has given a select group of people the license to lie. So someone had to say it!
5. “The hand that touches a Hindu woman must not exist.”
There is much hue and cry about this statement from the usual suspects. But then again, the communally charged statements that evoke a response depending on the community and not the notoriety of the statements themselves. There might be a practical reason for it too since nobody wants to be the next Charlie Hebdo. This statement was, in all likelihood, made in the context of Love Jihad, which is a reality in India whether the perfumed elites care to admit or not.
So will Ananth Kumar Hegde emerge as a mass-leader whom people can depend on for saying things as he sees them, and working accordingly? The early signs indicate that we have a Yogi Adityanath in the making in Karnataka. Rejoice!