MANGALURU: VT Prasad, a crime reporter with Mangaluru-based daily Karavali Ale, is describing his ordeal of two years ago in a matter-of-fact tone when, suddenly, the middle-aged man breaks down. “I’m sitting here talking to you now but I don’t know if I’ll be alive to do that tomorrow,” he says, taking a minute to recover.An unrelenting downpour lashes the coastal city as Prasad recounts how he was thrashed and left to die by members of the Popular Front of India (PFI), an Islamic group, according to the complaint he filed with the police. His crime?That he, a Hindu, had dared to help a Muslim woman in his village, a destitute widow who did not have a proper roof over her head. The case is being heard at the sessions court but Prasad says he continues to receive threats. “I can’t leave my 96-year-old father and move somewhere else,” he says, helplessly.If the PFI was responsible for the brutal communal assault on Prasad, it was members of the saffron brigade who beat up Mohammed Riyaz in February, then a final-year undergraduate student of computer applications.Sitting with his grandfather at their house in Surathkal, 15 km away from Mangaluru , the lanky 20-year-old is subdued as he describes the assault that put him in a hospital’s intensive care unit for three days. Riyaz’s classmate at Govinda Dasa College, Mohammed Swali, had stretched himself out on the laps of five of their female classmates and someone else took a photo. But when that photo was circulated on social media, trouble began brewing.Swali, you see, was a Muslim and the girls, Hindu. Riyaz, who can be seen in the edge of the picture’s frame, was abducted from his house and beaten up by six men who wanted to know where Swali was. He was released after three hours when the men realised Riyaz’s father had filed a police complaint and they were being tracked. “I don’t go out much these days... People watch me, and it’s not a good feeling,” he says.Attacks like these by rightwing vigilante groups have earned Mangaluru the tag of being a hub of “moral policing”, a misnomer for violence in the garb of “protecting” communities. The disturbing visuals of the 2009 attack led by the Sri Ram Sena, a right-wing Hindu group, on a group of girls at a pub in the city and another in 2012 by members of the Hindu Jagarana Vedike on a group of boys and girls at a home-stay on the city’s outskirts are yet to vanish from collective memory.But they have been succeeded by a steady stream of harassment of varying degrees of violence, particularly on couples from different communities. Just two weeks ago, a Muslim manager of a supermarket was stripped, tied to an electric pole and beaten in full public view, because he had been accompanied by a Hindu woman colleague in his car.It’s difficult to reconcile all these incidents with what a first-time visitor would see on the streets of the city, located 350 km from Bengaluru on the Konkan coast. Its multi-cultural, multi-linguistic essence is omnipresent, whether it is the temples, churches and mosques distributed throughout its various quarters, the way people dress, or the various languages you hear around you (Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Beary and Malayalam). The population demographic is cosmopolitan, divided between 69% of Hindus, around 17% Muslims, 13% Christians and a few other minorities.Yet, beneath this veneer is a communal unrest fomented by vigilante groups who have appointed themselves “guardians” of their community with the blessings of leaders who seek to polarise society. So much so, that an oft-repeated comment in Mangaluru is that if a boy and a girl from the Hindu and Muslim communities are even spotted together on a bus, the vehicle would be stopped by hooligans at some point.A conversation with Jagadeesh K Shenava, district president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), is both revealing and disquieting. An advocate, Shenava was previously with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) but says he was given the reins of the local unit when they needed someone “tough”.“There are only two matters in Mangaluru: boy and girl, and cow slaughter,” says Shenava, raising the favourite twin bogeys of Sangh Parivar parties. And though he says he does not endorse violence, Shenava is convinced parties like the VHP and Bajrang Dal are well within their rights to police society. He even goes on to claim, “Many parents have said [that] because of the Bajrang Dal, there is some control over society.”But it was not always so. Suresh Bhat Bakrabail, district president of Karnataka Komu Souharda Vedike (Karnataka Communal Harmony Forum), can recall a Mangaluru where communal incidents never escalated to this extent. Two of the local spirits or “bhoothas” worshipped by Hindus even had Muslim names, he says. Naveen Soorinje, a journalist from Mangaluru, also remembers a time when festival processions would stop at a mosque en route, and the Dalit priest offer a flower there. “That amity is no longer there,” says Soorinje, who has covered right-wing vigilantism in the region extensively, and was falsely implicated in the case in which the Hindu Jagarana Vedike attacked the guests at a home-stay.

Locals say Hindutva outfits shot into prominence back in the early ‘90s following the Babri Masjid demolition and were able to move into the space once occupied by the Left parties. Earlier, the Left drew many members from the Mangaluru tile manufacturing units and other factories, which are now in decline.



The Sangh Parivar worked assiduously to promote the Hindutva ideology among the local backward castes like the Billavas, who were traditionally toddy tappers, and the Mogaveers, the fishing community, says Bakrabail. “The Billavas used to be animists but today they too follow the Vedic traditions and use Brahmin priests,” he says.

The only change in recent years is that these incidents of “moral policing” are no longer the sole domain of the Sangh Parivar outfits, as the attack on Prasad shows. “Both communities are responsible for these incidents and have contributed in equal measure,” says BV Seetaram, editor-in-chief of three dailies in the region, including Karavali Ale.Seetaram is referring to parties like the Popular Front of India, and its earlier avatar, the Karnataka Forum for Dignity, which are a mirror image of the Bajrang Dal and indulge in the same sort of vigilantism. “And like anywhere else in the country, women are the target,” adds Seetaram, whose paper and staff members have been attacked on multiple occasions for their outspoken reportage.Thus, if the Hindutva brigade was responsible for 39 incidents of moral policing reported in the local media in 2014, the blame for 14 could be laid at the doors of Muslim vigilantes. Bakrabail has been keeping a record of communal incidents in the region based on local media reports since he retired as an engineer in 2006 and he says there has been no let-up.Leaders of the Jamat-e-Islami Hind, which positions itself as a moderate Islamic force in Mangaluru, give another clutch of reasons for the number of communal flare-ups and incidents of “moral policing”. “One, Hindutva organisations are very strong here, and there is a dedicated RSS cadre. Two, the prosperity of Muslims and influx of money from west Asia have created some amount of jealousy,” says Mohammed Kunhi, joint secretary of the organisation.The Popular Front of India, a federation of parties from Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, he says, is aiding the Sangh agenda with its violence. “The Congress here is riven by factionalism and there is no strong secular force to counter the saffron agenda,” he adds.Whether it is the Bajrang Dal, Hindu Jagarana Vedike or Popular Front, the modus operandi is similar. The parties reportedly have an established network of informers throughout the city who let them know if couples or friends from different religions are found spending time together and they threaten and intimidate them. As Seetaram points out, each community claims to be “protecting” their women and “values”.According to media reports and locals in the area, police often “counsel” the youngsters instead of going after the lumpen. In the instances where police complaints are filed, the vigilantes browbeat women to file counter-complaints.In the recent supermarket incident, for example, the woman colleague who can be seen covering her face in the video clip later complained that her Muslim supervisor, who had been attacked, had been harassing her and that the crowd had gathered in response to her cries for help.While agreeing that Mangaluru is a communally sensitive area and that there is a communal divide that gets exploited politically, police commissioner S Murugan says there is no rise as such in incidents of “moral policing”.“As far as reported cases go, there is a fall,” he says, dismissing incidents like the recent assault on the supermarket manager as oneoffs. Bakrabail’s carefully collated news reports of communal tensions, however, indicate that these groups seem to be acting with impunity. The truth that nobody would like to acknowledge, says Murugan, is that these issues enjoy currency among certain sections of communities. “How many Hindu leaders, for instance, condemned the supermarket case? These are the people who should be vociferously denouncing these incidents.”Still, the agenda to polarise is not yet all-pervasive. At Hotel Narayana, a well-known local eatery in the Bunder area near the port, customers from all communities and socioeconomic classes throng to sample the tawa-fry fish heaped with masala. Shyam Sunder, the proprietor of the 70-year old, no-frills establishment, says his business has not been affected by such incidents and he gets a fair number of both Hindu and Muslim diners. “I’m a businessman and can’t side with anyone as such,” he says.

Near Kasturba Medical College, two fourth-year MBBS students say they feel safer in Mangaluru than in Delhi and Chandigarh, the cities where they are from. “We have friends from all communities and we usually go out in groups. We’ve never faced problems,” says Vaishnavi Jatana.

Her friend, Aayushi Gupta, from Delhi, has even found people in Mangaluru to be relatively liberal. “I don’t feel awkward wearing skirts here,” she adds. Jamat-e-Islami’s Kunhi also says the rampant ghettoisation in places like Gujarat has not yet reached Mangaluru. “The Konkani businessmen need the Muslim customer,” he says. As much as the vigilante groups try to push their agenda, the city, it seems, has not yet given in.