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BANGALORE - BENGALOORU - BENGALURU
Bangalore to become Bengalooru: The politics of renaming cities
The polITics of getting Bangalored, the Dharam Singh way.
By Mannina.Maga
13 December, 2005: So names returned to haunt India’s uneasy identity as a global player with Bangalore all set to embrace the renaming bandwagon, following the examples of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. Shouldn’t these be Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai?
Well if you follow the state gazette it should be. And therein lies the seeds of a holy row.
Come November 6, 2006 and Bangalore will be history. It will be either Bengaluru as N Dharam Singh put it, or Bengaloooru, as the man who mooted the idea, Jnanaipith award winner U R Ananthamurthy, wants it.
But how is the global Indian, the faceless foreign traveller and the powers that be in cyber world going to swallow this name change? Going by experience, they would all just don’t care and continue referring to the cyber capital as Bangalore as the mannina maga (son of the soil) refers to it adoringly as Bengaluru. Hardanahalli Doddegowda Devegowda will be more than pleased.
It comes as no surprise that Dharam Singh has announced the government’s decision to rename India’s famed cyber city. Singh is in the CM’s chair by quirk of fate that saw the Congress receiving a set back in the hustings for what is widely perceived as basking in the deceiving glory of cyber city as farmers throughout the rest of the neglected parts of Karnataka went without power, food and bare essentials.
There were suicides in the countryside even as government showered sops on the Information Technology sector in the form of tax holidays et al. Only the cybermalls in Bangalore shined while the rest of Karnataka reeled under the onslaught of a combination of adverse factors, including drought.
As ministers vied with cyber czars for photo opportunities, the mannina maga was relegated to the backyards of rural Karnataka, where the soil wasn’t fertile enough for cyber malls to sprout. The government failed to connect with the rural masses and that was it.
The insult was too much to swallow and the first opportunity for a backlash came in the form of polls, where the voters vented their ire on the rulers in the only way they could.
It is, of course, a different matter that voters had a host of other issues too to get disgusted with the ruling dispensation.
Congress chose to cling on to power by sacrificing the tech-savy S M Krishna at the behest of the manninamaga Gowda, who got out of political slumber to celebrate the drubbing given by the sons of the soil to the netizens.
The story from then on had a somewhat familiar, stale script which Gowda and his Janata DAL (S) wrote and the spineless Dharam Singh regime shamelessly enacted – an assault on anything connected to IT beginning from questioning the credentials of Infosys mentor Narayanamurthy.
Gowda said Murthy had done nothing to bring the Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) to fruition in the past five years. A miffed murthy put in his papers as the chairman of BIAL.
What Dharam Singh now intends to do is more than just renaming. It is a feeble attempt to woo back the rural masses to the Congress fold. The Congress clearly knows that after the ruling coalition manipulated the verdict of the last Assembly polls to cling on to the CM’s gaddi, the rural masses have been further alienated from its fold, while the JD (S) has, by a curious mix of exercising power as well as taking up cudgels on behalf of the manninamaga, spread its domain of influence.
There is growing realisation in the Congress that its mass base in Karnataka is on the verge of extinction, while its coalition partner JD (U) has made inroads in rural Karnataka. And the BJP has cornered the opposition slot.
The Congress and Singh are in a desperate search for a political slot in Karnataka. Rather than having a pragmatic approach to fix issues haunting the party, the Dharam Singh administration is trying out short cuts like whipping up anti-colonial sentiments by renaming Bangalore and pampering to the growing chorus of regional chauvanism.
It is bound to fail for two reasons. The first one is that anti-colonial rhetoric has few takers when the ruling dispensation promotes it. Only when the government opposes it are passions aroused.
The second reason, which goes over the political skylines of Bangalore, is that when it comes to reaping the fruits of regional chauvinism, the Congress had been historically floored by lesser opponents. Or shall we say
Bangalored?
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