Siddaramaiah’s Anti-Superstition Bill Must First Ban Crows

I just got back to Bengalooru only to find it reeling under the twin-sledgehammers of unending downpour and Siddaramaiah.

Like me, the gentle people of Bangalore and Karnataka, far from complaining, actually welcome the rains. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, rain is the best visual broadcaster. Of lifting off the thin sheen of tar and asphalt. Of revealing in full potholed glory the corrupt nexus of the politician — corporator — contractor. Of craters of uneven shapes, sizes, and depths across Bangalore, making traffic lights redundant. An aerial view shows today’s Bangalore as a filthy, slushy art gallery.

Which is why like rain, we must let Siddaramaiah do his bidding since he’s his own best all-round broadcaster. The wisdom of the ages says that it’s always good to allow the unsavoury side of people in power to reveal itself because it’s then that they will celebrate the true extent of their depravity on their own volition. In full view of the public.

In this case, Karnataka’s Most Beloved Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, since he took office in 2013, has been doing just that in glorious technicolour. The typical modus operandi goes something like this:

1. Announce a “Bhagya” (dole) with total fanfare and pomp.
2. Get your face plastered all over Bangalore (and elsewhere in the state) on gigantic billboards broadcasting your boundless munificence.
3. Rinse.
4. Repeat.

Steps 1–4 has passed off as governance and administration in Karnataka from 2013 to now. And it promises to be even worse now that we’re on the threshold of the election season.

But this is actually the benign part of Governance Siddaramaiah™.

Splinter and Rule

The graver and more alarming danger is Siddaramaiah’s ruthless and unbridled pursuit of the time-tested B̶r̶i̶t̶i̶s̶h̶ Congress tradition of splinter and rule.

What began as numerous “Bhagyas” doled out first to Muslims and similar free carrots to Christians quickly degenerated into appeasement of radical Jihadi elements drawn from such terror outfits like the Popular Front of India (PFI). In short, Siddaramaiah seems to have found great affection for the Kerala Model, which has turned that state into a Jihadi Laboratory.

To put this in perspective, here’s what the Kerala Model means in terms of Jihad-related numbers between 2008 to present: from seven incidents in 2008, it progressed to thirty in 2012, thirty one in 2013, forty six in 2014, and fifty in 2015. Or a grand total of 231 Jihad-related incidents in the last nine years. Just in Kerala.

To drive the chills deeper, I urge the interested reader, concerned citizen, and caring Indian to read these academic papers on how Kerala has emerged as a Jihadi terror hub.

Killing the Hindu Society One Tradition at a Time

If that’s how Siddaramaiah pampers the followers of and converts to alien Desert Religions, he continues his attempts to vertically saw the populous Lingayat community, which forms a massive chunk of the BJP’s support base especially in North Karnataka. And the way he’s going about it has been crude, brazen, appalling, and all of the above. And like I said in the beginning, we must allow him his free run if only so he’ll unravel himself and his dangerous politics.

When Siddaramaiah failed to pit Lingayat Mathas against one another, he unleashed a nonentity named M B Patil, who can’t muster a decent crowd outside of his own constituency, as his hired gun. Enough said.

And now, his Cabinet has bulldozed the so-called Anti-Superstition Bill. When it was first mooted about three years ago, this Bill instantly generated statewide outrage and had to be hurriedly thrown into cold storage. The short version: it criminalised every Hindu practice, symbol, custom, tradition, and belief, and made it a breeze to take over Hindu institutions.

You must hand it to the Congress. Here’s the modus operandi in every such brazen bill:

1. Make the first draft so thoroughly outrageous that it borders on disbelief. That’s just the trial balloon to test how far the Congress can push the limits.
2. Pretend to withdraw it, give Opposition the illusion of victory.
3. Work on it on the sly after noting the key points that elicited the most fury.
4. Water it down, tinker with it as required and get Cabinet nod and place it before the Assembly for approval.

The track record of following this modus operandi has so far demonstrated a good percentage of success.

Academic Carpetbaggers at National Law School

Which is perhaps what Siddaramaiah is betting on in this case as well. Here’s how he puts it:

[Siddaramaiah] said the bill had been prepared keeping in mind the suggestions made by progressive thinkers and organisations.

We all know what “progressive thinkers and organisations” means: an assortment of Extreme Left thugs and their enablers like the dear departed Gauri Lankesh, and an alphabet soup of violent Left outfits which invariably contain one or more of these terms: “people(s),” “democratic,” “freedom,” “social,” “front,” “India,” and variations thereof.

But Siddaramaiah is being clever by half in 2017. The original, outrageous version of this “bill” was drafted by an “expert panel.” This is a fact that Siddaramaiah now glosses over.

Or, to put it bluntly, the outrageous version was authored by a bunch of academics occupying powerful positions in the National Law School, some of who are covertly supported by Evangelical outfits and others are hardboiled Communists. Indeed, the National Law School has now morphed into a sprawling den of anti-India academic carpetbaggers of various hues, injecting their chosen brand of poison into the brains of their wards.

The reason Siddaramaiah glosses over the aforementioned fact owes to the severe backlash he received the first time he floated this spurious anti-superstition balloon. And so, from criminalising every Hindu belief, tradition, custom, etc, the Bill has been watered down to read thus:

…nothing in the act shall apply with respect to the forms of worship mentioned under the heading ‘savings’ in the proposed act, like pradakshina, yatras, parikramas performed at religious places, among other normal practices.

He said it also includes the advice with regard to Vastushastra, advice by jyothishya and other astrologers.

Given the simple fact that starting with Siddaramaiah downwards, his Cabinet is a Hindu-majority Cabinet, criminalising things like yatras, etc will generate massive discontent within. But then, you never know with the Congress party…but what will generate open hostility is the thing about Vastu and Jyothishya. The more corrupt the Congressman or a Hindu Secularist, the greater a believer he/she is in these two Sastras.

Indeed, we have the readymade, illustrious instance in His Religiously Secular Eminence, Shri H D Deve Gowda who will wear a skullcap and proudly declare that he wants to be born a Muslim in the next birth, then goes home in the evening and calls upon an army of astrologers and priests and get a Chandi Homa performed in his name. The same Deve Gowda who was a mentor of sorts to the selfsame Siddaramaiah when he was in the Janata Dal (Secular).

The Story of the Crow

But there’s a deeper reason for preemptively precluding Vastu and Jyothishya. That reason may also be reasonably called the Story of the Crow.

Circa 14 June 2016: A crow perches on Siddaramaiah’s car bonnet and stubbornly refuses to budge despite being shooed away. The Honourable Chief Minister changes his car rather quickly after the incident.

Circa 20 January 2017: T̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶m̶e ̶A crow flutters over a dais shared by Siddaramaiah and Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan, and settles atop a tree branch overlooking the dais. Moments later, it poops on Siddaramaiah’s crisp, white dhoti. The media didn’t report the details of the post-poop story.

It is widely believed among some circles that a crow is inauspicious and brings bad luck.

Siddaramaiah’s Scorched-Earth Policy

On a more serious note, one wonders whether the Congress party is even an organic whole anymore.

While Rahul Gandhi, the party’s Prime Minister-permanently-in-waiting is on a phoney pony show trying to woo the Hindu vote in Gujarat, Siddaramaiah is doing the exact opposite: mollycoddling the radical Muslim elements, and doing his best to alienate the Hindu vote.

Even in his much-touted “anti-superstition bill,” the language is weak, wavering and apologetic.

Stating that there were provisions to make any addition or deletion from the proposed bill, [Law Minister] Jayachandra said, “It will come to force once gazetted, and there are provisions to also amend or alter it thereafter.”

In fact, with this singular move, the Siddaramaiah-led Congress in Karnataka has given a massive opportunity that the BJP can exploit to dramatically shore up its political capital. If the BJP is smart, it can both outflank and polarise the Congress from within using just this so-called anti-superstition bill.

What’s actually harrowing about the so-called anti-superstition bill is intent. Or the sheer, naked evil operating behind it that becomes evident when we get to the following wording:

…the Karnataka bill has ‘savings’ and ‘schedule’ categories, which classify the practices that can be tolerated and those that need to be controlled or prohibited. [Emphasis added]

I’ll never tire of saying this: this is precisely the language of the Communists, the mind-controllers, the 1984ists. Where elected representatives speak in the tongue of despots.

One needs to narrate to Siddaramaiah the story of the Naga Sadhus who dared the British, who, at the height of their imperial tyranny wanted to prohibit the lifestyle and practices of the Naga Sadhus and get them to adopt “civilised” (read: British) mores. One of these Sadhus in all his filthy and naked glory shat right before the British official, ate his own excreta and asked the civilised man to follow suit as a precondition to him becoming civilised. The Brit never troubled him again.

But in a purely political context, beginning sometime in April or May this year, Siddaramaiah launched his own version of the scorched earth policy: make Karnataka so pervasively ungovernable that anybody who comes after him will be doomed to fail. Case in point: at the state it is currently in, there’s simply no way anyone can fix Bangalore’s all-round chaos in any reasonable timeframe.

Postscript: Oh, and if Siddaramaiah loses, the crow would’ve had the last laugh.