Bengaluru : For the first time, Karnataka’s highest decision-making body will take its political theatre to the state’s coast. Chief Minister DK Shivakumar’s (DKS) government is scheduled to hold its Cabinet meeting in Mangaluru on September 18. The venue of Cabinet meetings of the Karnataka government has rarely been shifted from the state’s capital, Bengaluru, to any other place.
This decision by the Congress government holds significance for the party as it has been struggling for decades to gain prominence in the region due to the dominance of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The coastal Karnataka belt has long been described as the “Hindutva laboratory” of the RSS, where ideological consolidation found early and fertile ground before spreading to other parts of Karnataka and beyond.
Indira Gandhi’s declaration of Emergency in 1975 played a key role as the RSS encashed the Congress’s opposition across coastal Karnataka. The displeasure towards the Congress grew in the region, as people mobilised against the Emergency. That is precisely why CM DKS’s decision to take the Cabinet to Mangaluru assumes significance. The Congress party is not simply taking governance outside Bengaluru — it appears to be taking the fight into one of the BJP’s most comfortable electoral territories in the country.
The decision to hold the DKS government’s first Cabinet meeting in Dakshina Kannada is about visibility, outreach and an attempt to disrupt an equation that has remained remarkably stable for nearly three decades. Udupi was carved out of the undivided Dakshina Kannada district in August 1997, creating the present two-district coastal configuration, with eight Assembly seats in Dakshina Kannada and five in Udupi.
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