more-inHistory has been weaponised afresh in the electoral war zone of Karnataka. Since then, we have been witness to a kind of deep mining of Karnataka history to serve two distinct purposes: reel in the votes of specific caste communities and construct a narrative of Hindutva unity. Inconvenient truthsNot since the 1920s and 1930s in the Hindi/Hindu heartland has there been such a determined search for a Hinduised historical narrative. Such selective memorialising also effaces the pasts of Karnataka: nothing has revealed this as much as the Right’s ‘ownership’ of the Basavanna legacy. But, as Walter Benjamin had darkly warned, even the dead will no longer be safe if this mission of programmatic remembering and forgetting is allowed to triumph.

Source: The Hindu May 09, 2018 17:37 UTC