Pramod Mutalik, a self-proclaimed Hindutva saviour and leader of Sri Ram Sena, has begun his new innings in politics essaying the role of the State unit president of the Shiv Sena.
After returning to Karnataka from Mumbai following a meeting with Uddhav Thakre and other Shiv Sena leaders, he opened the party office in Uttarahalli in Bengaluru on Friday.
He announced that Shiv Sena would contest at least 50 seats in the upcoming Karnataka assembly polls
Meeting his close associates and followers, he told them that they needed to stay together and work for the establishment of society based on Hindutva.
He said that the summer elections were only one phase in the multi-layered process of establishing society based on Hindutva principles. He asked them to find inspiration from the life of medieval era king Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj who battled the Muslim Sultans.
He said that time was ripe for the entry of Shiv Sena in the State. “We will make that long-felt impact on State politics,” he said. He is confident that the party would win 10-20 seats.
However, the Karnataka Rakshna Vedike has appealed to Kannadigas to boycott the Shiv Sena which it has described as an anti-Kannada party. Mr. Mutalik maintains that the Shiv Sena in Karnataka will not be anti-Kannada.
“I will make sure nothing of that sort happens here. We are committed to the fact that Belagavi will remain in Karnataka. Irrespective of what other Shiv Sena leaders feel or say about this issue, we will not support the merger issue,” he said. Hailing from a family of resourceful sugarcane cultivators from Hukkeri in Belagavi district, Mr. Mutalik says he has spent his entire adulthood in serving society. “I left home 35 years ago and have never returned,” he said.
He says he started his public life at the age of 20, joining the RSS as a Pracharak after a jail term during the 1975 Emergency.
Apart from working in some districts, he ended up as a teller of “moral” stories in the children’s section of the RSS in Mysuru till 1994. He spent the next decade organising youth with aggressive Hindutva mindsets in the Bajrang Dal.
He believes that the Bajrang Dal’s activities nearly doubled the BJP’s count in the Assembly in 2004 from 44 to 79.
But the BJP betrayed me, he said. Some BJP leaders developed insecurity and did not want me to grow. They, along with some Sangh Parivar leaders plotted against me. Because of my pro-Hindu activities, I went to jail multiple times and now am facing nearly 70 cases. But this service was neither recognised by the BJP nor the Sangh Parivar, he said.
He feels that the BJP is a fake Hindutva party and is interested only in votes and political power. Shiv Sena is the true Hindutva party. That is why I joined it, he said.
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