The posters are everywhere in Hubballi – on electricity poles, on bus stops, on advertising hoardings. They grow sharper and in number, occupying virtually every lamp post, closer to Bidnal, a residential colony in the southeastern part of the city. There are small changes in format but they all have one thing in common: A photograph of 23-year-old Neha Hiremath. And they all scream the same thing — “Justice for Neha.”
At 4.30pm on April 18, Neha Hiremath, a first-year Master’s student of computer application was walking towards the college gates of the BV Bhoomaraddi campus of the KLE Technological University, where her mother was waiting to pick her up. On the way, the young woman was accosted by 23-year-old Fayaz Khondunaik, a former classmate who had dropped out of the course. As CCTV recordings captured images that would shock a state, Khondunaik brandished a knife and stabbed Hiremath six times. He fled, only to be arrested later that day. Hiremath was rushed to the hospital but did not survive.
Karnataka went into uproar with sweeping street protests and candle-light vigils. Hiremath’s family is influential — her father Niranjan Hiremath is a Congress corporator of the Hubballi Dharwad Municipal Corporation. Within hours, the killing tipped into politics and religion. Khondunaik was Muslim, Hiremath a Hindu. This sparked talk of “love jihad”, a term that has no legal or government sanction is often used by Hindu right-wing groups to describe relationships involving Muslim men and Hindu women.
In the three weeks since, the BJP has spoken of Hiremath’s shocking murder extensively in its campaign. On April 29, at a rally in neighbouring Belagavi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “What happened with our daughter in a college campus in Hubbali shook the entire nation. They don’t value the lives of our daughters such as Neha. All they care about is their vote bank… ever since the Congress government came to Karnataka, the law and order has deteriorated significantly.” The death has become one of the sharpest points in the BJP’s campaign to defend its Lok Sabha citadel.
Karnataka is no stranger to political battle lines being drawn over religion. It’s a state where the history of Tipu Sultan is still fiercely contested in election campaigns; where girl students wearing the Hijab in educational institutions sparked a turmoil and tumult for almost two years; where even cosmopolitan urban centres such as Mangaluru have a history of moral policing laced with religious conservatism.
Yet, the row has put into spotlight phenomenon of splinter communal issues – many of them framed around dubious claims such as “love jihad” – being fanned by fringe groups and increasingly entering the political mainstream, and its devastating effect on the local social fabric.
The politics
The Hiremath home in Bidnal is two storeys tall, accessible only through a maze of narrow alleys, all at right angles to each other. To its right and to its left are rows and rows of the same kind of two-storey homes — flat concrete terraces that overlook endless agricultural fields where the urban squalor ends; some populated by sugarcane stalk, others where sunflowers sway gently in the summer breeze.
Since April 18, the stream of visitors who have navigated the thin alleys of Bidnal has been incessant. BJP chief JP Nadda came on April 21, and Union home minister Amit Shah 10 days later. Congress chief minister Siddaramaiah came on April 25, and state women and child development minister Laxmi Hebbalkar on April 20, two days after the death.
For the first few days after his daughter’s killing, an inconsolable father publicly said that he believed that it was a case of “love jihad”, accusing the state police of botching the investigation, and praising Modi for mentioning his daughter’s case.
The Congress scrambled into damage control, and underlined that Khondunaik was arrested, and that investigations were underway. On April 23, after Siddaramaiah spoke to him over the phone and multiple ministerial delegations visited, Hiremath seemed to step back, apologising for his comments against the state government. “I expressed doubts over the inquiry, but it has turned out that the police have done their job properly. I apologise for my words, which was the result of misinformation,” he said.
Hours before Dharwad voted on Tuesday, Hiremath went a step further, and with minister Laxmi Hebbalkar by his side, sought votes in favour of the Congress.
But the incident has taken a political life of its own.
“In the Neha Hiremath murder case, we have found direct proof of the love jihad that we have been talking about. Today, all Hindus have become alert. The Congress does too much appeasement of the minority community. It is the scene everywhere wherever the Opposition is in power,” Lingraj Patil, the BJP in-charge said told HT, adding that this was the single biggest issue in the local campaign.
The Congress, on its part, accused the BJP of politicising the issue. “Everything should not be politicised, especially in a case where religion has nothing to do with the crime. A similar instance happened in Mysore where the attacker was not Muslim…this shows that the BJP has no other issues to fight these elections,” Congress leader Amaan Sait told HT.
BJP’s dominance
If electoral history is a reliable witness, voters of the twin cities of Hubballi and Dharwad, which lie at the centre of the Dharwad Lok Sabha constituency, need little convincing to vote for the BJP. The party has won this seat since 1996, when it was called Dharwad North. After 2008, the seat was renamed Dharwad and has been held by Union minister Pralhad Joshi.
Local election watchers point to a seminal few years after 1991, seeped in religious politics, that laid the BJP’s foundation for dominance. Between 1977 and 1996, it was the Congress that ruled Dharwad. But the early 1990s was a time of tumult in Indian politics, when the Babri Masjid was demolished and a great wave of Mandir politics swept the hinterland. In Dharwad, this took a different form, with a custody battle of sorts for the local Idgah Maidan.
Till then, the open space in the centre of town was used primarily for Muslim gatherings besides sundry uses such as parking and makeshift markets. But for two years between 1992 and 1994, the BJP loudly pushed for opening the maidan to multiple communities, particularly Hindus. On August 15, 1994, a tense state government, then run by the Congress, clamped prohibitory orders, but BJP leader Uma Bharti and her supporters defied the diktat, attempting to forcibly hoist the national flag. A commotion ensued, and the police opened fire. Six died.
In every Lok Sabha and assembly election since then, the BJP has triumphed. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Joshi won the Dharwad seat by a margin of more than 200,000 votes; while in the assembly polls, the BJP retained both the Hubballi Dharwad West and Hubballi Dharwad Central seats — two of the three urban seats in the district. Jagadish Shettar, a six time MLA and former BJP chief minister who switched from the BJP to the Congress at the time, lost to a first-timer from the BJP by a bigger margin than he had ever won. He has now quietly returned to the BJP fold.
“The people of this constituency have been voting for the BJP across communities and on issues like Hindutva for decades. This time there is the additional factor of the Ram temple, and now the Neha Hiremath murder,” said a local resident, who did not want to be named.
One senior Congress leader admitted that Hiremath’s murder could cause the party damage, particularly at a time when the state government was seeking to focus on the social guarantees it implemented since 2023, and there was a sense of unease among the BJP’s oldest vote bank — the Lingayats. “After all, Hiremath was a Lingayat,” he said.
Local equations
The summer of 2023 was a chastening time for the Karnataka BJP. It lost its only state government south of the Vindhyas, falling from 104 seats in 2018 to 66 in 2023. There were many post-mortem examinations; blame was laid at the door of the perception that the state government had fallen prey to corruption and that the leadership was uninspiring.
But for most, the beginning of the fall came in July 2021 when the BJP replaced Lingayat stalwart and then chief minister BS Yediyurappa with Basavraj Bommai, an attempt at a generational change. The move backfired; the Lingayats, who are the largest community in the state, retreated from the BJP. The effects were particularly stark in central and northern Karnataka, especially in districts such as Dharwad where they are close to a quarter of the population. The Congress won four of the seven assembly segments.
In November, a chastised BJP course-corrected, and BY Vijayendra, Yediyurappa’s son, became the state unit chief, putting the party’s first family in the state back in charge. And yet, right until voting day, there is some evidence of continued discomfiture.
On April 8, Dingaleshwar Swamiji, a popular seer of the Lingayat Shirahatti Fakireshwar Math in Shirahatti outside Hubballi, announced his candidature as an independent against Joshi, accusing him of suppressing the Lingayat community. Two weeks later, on April 23, the seer withdrew.
The BJP has brushed aside the challenge posed by the Lingayat seer as an underhand attempt by the Congress to split the BJP votes. “In Hubballi, the Congress has tried to raise issues of caste and to disturb voting patterns on these lines. But it will not work,” Lingraj Patil said.
The Congress pick from Dharwad is Vinod Asooti, a Kuruba who is from the same caste as Siddaramaiah, and a first-time contestant. Before this, Asooti unsuccessfully contested the 2018 state assembly elections from the Navalgund seat in north-east Dharwad and is a two-term state district Congress chief. “The question facing Asooti is how he is going to take on the BJP’s dominance in the Hubballi Dharwad (West), currently represented by the BJP’s Arvind Bellad and the Hubballi Dharwad (Central), currently represented by Mahesh Tenginakai, both of which have given a lead of more than 50,000 votes each to Joshi,” a Congress leader said, requesting anonymity.
A second Congress leader said the AHINDA – a Kannada acronym for minorities, backward classes and Dalits – could help the party. “Surveys have shown that the Congress guarantees are working and have had a huge impact among rural voters and women voters,” the leader added, requesting anonymity.
But in the bylanes of Bidnal, the conversation is far away from any mention of candidates; of Asooti or Joshi; even of Modi or Siddaramaiah. The rumours and allegations around the murder have deepened faith-based fault lines, forced the Muslim community, who form a fifth of the population, into silence, and ratcheted up hostility.
“The murder and the speculation around it has shocked the city and left us with a feeling that no one is safe,” said Shanmukhappa Basavanneppa Tirlapur, a local school teacher.
“I feel the community is being blamed for the actions of one individual. It was not our fault that the murder happened…unfortunately I can see that people will use this as an excuse to divide us,” a Muslim rickshaw driver, who declined to be named, said.
Outside Neha Hiremath’s pale yellow home, too, the mood is sombre. In a plain white shirt, his face sombre and drawn, an elderly relative, who refuses to be named, dreads the weeks to come, and the shrill communal pitch the issue has taken. “With the voting done, the issue will be forgotten, and the family will be left to bear the loss. Even now, look around you. The media has gone,” he said. “But our scars — those of the family and the community — will remain.”