Crusade For Minority Status For Lingayat Religion

Syed Khalique Ahmed

NEW DELHI—Does Lingayat/Veerashaiva community belong to the Hindu religion? Or the Lingayat/Veerashaiva is an independent religion? This question has been in debate for several decades in Karnataka, where the Lingayats, a politically dominant community concentrated in North Karnataka.

While the BJP State government headed by BS Yediyurappa in 2017 granted religious minority status to Lingayat/Veerashaiva community, the central government, in an affidavit to the Karnataka High Court in December 2018, said that it had rejected the recommendations of the Karnataka state government to grant religious minority status to the Lingayat/Veerashaiva community. Yediyurappa himself belongs to the Lingayat/Veerashaiva community. Lingayats play a significant part in Karnataka’s politics.

While speaking at the ‘Ek Sawal, Ek Jawab’ programme hosted by Jamaat-e-Islami Hind’s (JIH) media secretary Syed Tanveer Ahmed, Prof. Sanjay Makal, President of the Vishwa Lingayat Mahasabha, strongly justifies the Lingayat community’s demand for the status of an independent religion, outside the Hindu religious fold. Prof. Makal has, for a long, been campaigning for the grant of a minority religious status to the community.

Stating that Lingayatism has its own philosophical stand concerning religion, Prof. Makal says that the gazetteers of the British period and the Mysore gazetteers prepared during the Wadiyar dynasty mentioned Lingayat as a separate religion, not a sect of Hinduism. British Gazeteer, says Prof. Makal, noted that “Lingayat is a new religion.” However, some people linked it with British policy to divide Hindus. But he rejects this allegation of ‘divide and rule’. Several British philosophers and intellectuals also wrote books on “Little Lingayat Religion’, discussing how Lingayats are different from Hindus. British scholars mentioned the number of castes among Lingayats and their names which are different from the castes found among Hindus. The Mysore Gazeteer, written during Wadiyar rulers, also mentions the castes among Lingayats and Hindu religions. Both the British and Mysore gazetteers have nowhere mentioned that Lingayats are a caste or sub-caste of Hindus. “So, Lingayat is a separate religion like Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism,” claims Prof. Makal.

He claims that some of the old judgments of Bombay, Mysore, and Madras courts have mentioned Lingayat as a separate and independent religion.

READ ALSO: What Is Lingayat Religion? Why Do Its Followers Believe In Monotheism?

But strong demand for granting a minority status for the Lingayat religion began in the 1960s. The idea behind seeking the status of a separate religion was to promote and propagate the religion among the masses. However, some Lingayats began calling themselves Veershaivas and demanded recognition of Veershaiva as a religion of Lingayat people like the ‘Khalsa’ of Sikhs. This, said Prof. Makal, created confusion among the people in the government at various levels. Hence, the claim for the status of a new religion of Lingayat was rejected.

In 2011-12, Prof Makal authored a book, arguing that Lingayats are not Hindus. His claims are based on observations of various courts in their old judgments and how Lingayat as a separate religion came into existence.

In a previous interview published on April 4, Prof Makal stated that the Lingayat religion believes in one God, and Lingayats are strict monotheists, totally different from Hinduism.