CALLED to evening prayer, 8,500 schoolboys shuffle in very long lines along a grand arcade built in the shadow of a granite plateau. Barefoot, each wears a white lungi, a red shoulder-cloth and three horizontal streaks of ash across his forehead. Slogans painted on the boulders above remind them that “Work is worship” and “One god has different names.” These are quotes from Basava, a poet, philosopher and administrator who lived in the area in the 12th century.

The holy men who teach at the Siddaganga mutt (monastery), 70km from the IT hub of Bangalore, revere both the god Shiva and Basava, who was a monotheist. That makes them Lingayats. But does it make them Hindus too?

The creed has plenty of the trappings of Hinduism, but an unusual fixation on social justice. Its most esteemed adherent, Shivakumara Swami (pictured), the head of the mutt, is 110 years old. He spends most of his time lying quietly on a modern hospital bed in a granite temple at Siddaganga, but he is still known as “the walking god”, after a lifetime spent travelling the surrounding countryside, teaching and soliciting alms on behalf of the poor.

On September 10th he and his designated successor received a minister from the local state government, M.B. Patil, a fellow Lingayat and member of the Congress Party. Mr Patil came away announcing that the great seer had agreed with him that Lingayatism should be declared its own religion, distinct from Hinduism. The same evening an envoy from the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, rushed to the mutt and persuaded its leaders to refrain from any such judgment. A steady stream of politicians has since made the pilgrimage. Delegates from both parties, all Lingayats, plead quietly for a moment of the swami’s dwindling time.

Hinduism is an amorphous religion, with many schools and sects. The question of when an offshoot becomes its own faith keeps squads of anthropologists busy, but tends not to matter much to anyone else. But Lingayats account for 17% of the population of Karnataka, where Siddaganga is located, and an election beckons early next year. The state is the last big one to be held by Congress, after a series of BJP victories around the country in recent years.

For decades most Lingayats have voted as a block for the BJP. In Karnataka the party is led by B.S. Yeddyurappa, a Lingayat who presided over a scandal-prone government from 2008 to 2011. But the community now seems divided, with some mutts clamouring for minority-religion status and others content to be counted as a caste within Hinduism. In August a rally for the cause of not-Hinduism attracted nearly 200,000 marchers.

Only a decree from Mr Modi’s government can officially elevate Lingayatism from a mere sect into a religion. But the BJP’s ideology of Hindu nationalism obliges it to oppose any step that smacks of undermining Hindu solidarity. The grubby electoral stakes are also important. The BJP is keen to win over sceptical, mostly lower-caste Hindus from India’s southern states, who often accuse Hindi-speaking northerners of cultural imperialism, to cement its grip on national politics. Congress, meanwhile, is the obvious beneficiary of divisions among the BJP’s supporters in Karnataka.

Like many reformist movements within Hinduism, Lingayats bridle at the caste system. Similar impulses have underpinned the evolution of several religions with Indian origins, including Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Basava implored followers to renounce “all the ties born of vanity and riches”. A scholar of the faith, S.M. Jaamdar, likens Basava to Martin Luther, and his poetry to Luther’s 95 theses calling for radical reforms to Catholicism, “but written 200 years earlier”. Lingayats’ near-heretical devotion to social justice is under constant threat, he says, paraphrasing another scholar: “Hinduism is an ocean and Lingayatism is an island; the ocean will always erode the island.”

Such claims arouse violent passions. A like-minded colleague of Mr Jaamdar’s, M.M. Kalburgi, was shot dead in 2015. So was another crusading Lingayat, the journalist Gauri Lankesh, who in August published an essay arguing that Lingayatism should be considered a distinct faith. She was assassinated less than a month later.

Ms Lankesh was also an atheist and a staunch left-winger, whose views had earned her enemies far and wide. There are any number of theories about the motive for her murder. But the debate about Basava and the meaning of Hinduism is no longer just an academic one. The walking god of Siddaganga, already a middle-aged holy man when India held its first election after independence, might not mind how the current government categorises his beliefs. But his young disciples have long careers as voters ahead of them.