Yatnal: The Hindutva firebrand who is B S Yediyurappa’s bete noire

Basanagouda Ramanagouda Patil Yatnal is no “adjustment” politician in the words of his closest supporters.

To sample the 57-year-old BJP leader’s style of functioning, we need go no further back than a few days when he openly berated B S Yediyurappa for his government’s “neglect” of Assembly constituencies in north Karnataka and the CM’s style of functioning at a BJP legislators meet. Yatnal, say insiders, was so livid with the state of affairs that the CM had to ask the Bijapur City MLA to “tone down.”

This is not the first time that Yatnal has targeted Yediyurappa openly, provoking many in political circles to wonder whether he is the BJP central leadership’s chosen one to take on Yediyurappa internally. The BJP leadership is believed to be on the lookout for a replacement for the 77-year-old Yediyurappa and Yatnal, an RSS-man, Hindutva firebrand, Lingayat and former union minister, ticks quite a few boxes.

If that is indeed true, the BJP leadership will have to be ready to deal with more than it bargained for.

It’s no secret that Yatnal is something of a self-styled daredevil who has even blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the Centre’s delay in providing flood aid to Karnataka in 2019. The party had slapped him with a show-cause notice for the act of indiscipline back then. But it seems to have had little impact on him.

“I’m not afraid of anything. In my 30-year political career, I have always spoken for people, for development,” Yatnal said about his controversial statements.

Yatnal, it is believed, has his own set of backers among a section of BJP MLAs who are “too afraid” to speak out. But that has never been Yatnal’s style. In a chequered political career, which started in 1990 as the BJP’s Vijayapura City vice-president, he has worn his outspokenness and Hindutva credentials on his sleeve. To his opponents it is nothing more than brazenness and open prejudice, but that has not deterred him.

Like UP’s Yogi Adityanath, Yatnal has come to public attention by being quite the rabble-rouser. From 1994, when he won the Bijapur City seat, to becoming an MP from the area in 1999, and then catching Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s eye, Yatnal’s ascent has been quick.

In 2001, Yatnal took on the then Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who wanted the Centre to stop the Upper Krishna Project. Naidu even threatened to pull out of the NDA. In response, Yatnal threatened to quit as MP, forcing the late H N Ananth Kumar to step in. Yatnal got noticed, and was inducted as a minister in the Vajpayee government in 2002.

“Ananth Kumar had ensured that Yatnal became a minister in the Vajpayee Cabinet at a young age so as to hone him as an alternative Lingayat leader against Yediyurappa,” a senior BJP leader said.

BJP itself was forced to expel Yatnal twice — in 2010 and 2015 — for ‘anti-party’ activities. His first expulsion, for his sharp criticism of the party’s affairs, took him to the JD(S). Yatnal returned to the BJP in 2013, but he was booted out two years later for contesting as a rebel candidate in the Legislative Council election, which he won.

Outside politics, Yatnal heads Shri Siddeshwar Samsthe, a 122-year-old nonprofit, and a sugar factory. His Hindutva fidelity has earned him the moniker of ‘Hindu tiger’.

“He runs a gaushala that houses 1,000 cows without any government aid,” said Raghav Annigeri, president of the Swami Vivekananda Sene that Yatnal founded in 2008. “He has always believed in Hindutva and the grooming of nationalist youths. If he was an adjustment politician like everyone else, he could have become chief minister instead of D V Sadananda Gowda,” Annigeri said.

Yatnal has courted controversy regularly: He once instructed councillors to work for Hindus and not Muslims and said that intellectuals should be shot. He brazenly attacked the centenarian freedom fighter H S Doreswamy by calling him “a fake freedom fighter” and “an agent of Pakistan”, leading to a huge political row.

“Never have I said sorry for anything I’ve said, nor have I retracted any of them,” Yatnal said. It may be a statement for the record books. In October 2020, he predicted that Yediyurappa would be removed from his post and “the next CM will be from north Karnataka.”