Karnataka   

Ostracised for speaking up

— Photo: R. Eswarraj

Dinakara Gowda .

MOGRU VILLAGE/BELTHANGADY TALUK: You can meet Dinakara Gowda (55) in flesh and blood in this village. You can also meet his wife and two teenage sons. The sprawling house he lives in is real; so are the 15 acres of farmland that he owns. But in the eyes of some people, close to the village temple committee, he just does not exist.

The president (Ramanna Gowda) and vice-president (Balekrishna Gowda) of the Mogeradka Daivasthana Committee say there is no person called Dinakara Gowda in Mogru. The committee has passed a decree against the man who they claim does not exist. Anybody in the village found speaking or interacting with him is immediately ostracised. People excluded from the society for interacting with Dinakara Gowda’s family include Brahmins, Other Backward Castes, the Dalits and even Muslims. This fact is confirmed by representatives from all these communities. “I have to perform a special puja at the temple as penance if I am caught speaking to Dinakara’s family,” said Parameshwari Bhat (45), his neighbour. “Nobody is supposed to speak to me in the village because I sold provisions to Dinakara,” said K. Ibrahim, a village grocer.

The temple committee’s grouse against Dinakara Gowda is 30 years old. The trouble started in 1979 when the gram panchayat passed an order for the creation of a narrow, eight-kilometre-long cycle route connecting the village to the town of Uppinangady.

The temple committee wanted the path to take a detour and pass the temple. The village people, led by Mr. Dinakara Gowda, had opposed this circuitous route. The then gram panchayat upheld Mr. Dinakara’s stand. For the next 26 years, Mr. Dinakara is said to have toiled over the road, often spending his own money. “Led by him, the village people built the road with their own hands,” said Meenakshi (45), a resident of the village. Finally, in 2005, the Government sanctioned a proper tar road under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana. The animosity came to a head around 1995 when Mr. Dinakara demanded at a panchayat meeting that the temple committee declare its book of accounts. This created a furore and the priests of the temple banned him from entering the temple. Things worsened when Mr. Dinakara called for a ban on cock-fighting and alcohol abuse, during temple festivals, said Ravinarayana Bhat, a resident of the village. He said it was the excuse the temple committee used to pass the decree against Mr. Dinakara’s family. The village people were ordered to cut their ties with the family. The erstwhile Tahsildar K.T. Kaveriappa dismissed the issue as “a family feud”.

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