A couple of years ago, 2018-19 to be precise, he was going around uttering leftist dialogues, invoking names of rights activists like K Balagopal, aligning with the Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). His election campaign was suffused with red and blue iconography, with a special place for the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. His fans, too, would spout terms like guerrilla. Their vehicles were adorned with pictures of Guevara, who was also a presence in at least one of the movies this leader acted in in the past.

Cut to 2024. The same leader, again vociferously supported by his fans, this time aided by a vituperative social media, is now pushing the Hindus-are-in-danger narrative and seen sweeping the steps of a temple in Andhra Pradesh, infused with saffron and ochre colours.

While ideological flip-flops are neither rare nor need to be met with disapproval, the transformation of actor-turned-still acting-Deputy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh provides many stark lessons: establishing a party without a strong ideological foundation, running a party without a structured cadre or leadership beyond the top, catering more to fans than to the people, and the allure of Hindutva for individuals with such fluid political identities.

If anyone is still unclear about the description, the person being talked about here is Konidela Pawan Kalyan, the chief of the Jana Sena Party (JSP), the Deputy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, as well as the state's Environment, Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister.

In the last weeks, Andhra Pradesh was rocked with allegations of supply of adulterated ghee to the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), popularly known as Tirupati temple. The present alliance government, comprising Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Jana Sena Party (JSP), and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), recently alleged that during the tenure of the previous YSR Congress Party (YSRCP), contracts were given at low prices and ghee adulterated with animal fat was supplied to Tirupati. While the Centre for Analysis and Learning in Livestock and Food (CALF) lab of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) confirmed that the ghee was adulterated, the adulterant hasn't been confirmed.

While Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu fired the first salvo by airing these allegations, it was Pawan Kalyan who took it to a whole new level, voicing the Hindutva's pet peeve of removing temples from the government's control and the associated assortment of demands regularly voiced by these sections. He even announced an eleven-day penance to purify himself and the temple.

Jana Sena to Hindutva Sena

A brief detour to his acting career is needed here to understand the present. Pawan Kalyan entered the Telugu Film Industry under the shadows of his elder brother, Chiranjeevi, who also ran a political party for a brief time. However, Pawan Kalyan carved a special niche for himself, away from his brother. It would not be a wrong representation to say that while his brother portrayed the character of an elder son bogged down by familial responsibilities in his reel life, the characters Pawan Kalyan played were that of a pampered, carefree, irresponsible younger son, progressing to an angry young man bristling with righteous anger at the injustices in the world. He even played a Naxalite in one of his movies, though the Naxalite in the movie was no more than a gun-toting, platitude-mouthing angry young man. There were films of his where his character ridiculed irrational Hindu rituals and epics.

While Pawan Kalyan is from the Kapu caste, a Shudra peasant caste predominantly settled in the Godavari delta, his fan base comprises youngsters from lowered castes and Muslims. He started his political journey as the head of the youth wing of Chiranjeevi's Praja Rajyam Party (PRP). Though the party made an impressive debut in 2009, winning in more than a dozen constituencies, his brother coveted a central ministry and merged the party with the Congress by 2013.

Afterwards, Pawan Kalyan established the JSP. The new state of Andhra Pradesh was formed in 2014. JSP did not contest in the elections held in 2014 in Andhra. Instead, he declared support for the TDP, which went to elections in alliance with the BJP. However, by 2018, TDP was up against the BJP, and Pawan Kalyan, too, drifted away from TDP to align with the CPI, CPI(M), and BSP. In the elections held in 2019, YSRCP trumped TDP, and JSP and TDP were again on the same side, though not formally. Soon, JSP aligned with BJP. It did not take more than three years for him to move from Guevara to Golwalkar.

His politics has always been directionless – ideologically or organisationally – to put it mildly. Despite running a party for a decade, one will be hard-pressed to find either leaders or cadre. The only leader is Pawan Kalyan, and the only cadre are his fans, notwithstanding the Kapu caste rallying behind his party in the recent elections. Polemically agitational politics, while retaining the righteous angry young man persona is the only praxis he appears to believe in. However, such directionless fluidity is also what makes one vulnerable to all-encompassing Hindutva.

A political party, of whatever hue, has an organisational structure and cadre base that play the role of checks and balances against the individual leader's proclivities and extreme flip-flops. The lack of it in JSP helps him, and by extension Hindutva, to drive the party in whichever direction they would like to, with little to no scrutiny and feedback.

Hindutva, caste, power

To understand the mutual appeal of Hindutva and Pawan Kalyan, a brief understanding of a region – the support base of Pawan Kalyan – is necessary. The picturesque Konaseema in the Godavari delta, where aqua ponds and coconut gardens vie with each other to enrich the peasants, has historically been the centre of the highbrow Sanskritic Telugu culture, helmed and nurtured by the powerful Konaseema Brahmins. It is also the region that is one of the nerve centres of Telugu politics, but with no leaders, so to speak.

Krishna delta and Rayalaseema (counting Nellore) have duopolised the leadership in Telugu politics for the past seven decades, with some space to north Andhra. Politically speaking, while Brahmins and Reddys ran the Congress and the government for decades, the advent of Kamma-led TDP with the support of Backward Classes (BCs) upended this equation. However, missing in this transformation were Kapus. They were divided between TDP and Congress, and later YSRCP, and had no party of their own, so to speak. While Chiranjeevi's PRP raised some hopes, it proved to be a damp squib. It is this void that the BJP has been trying to fill, to the benefit of themselves and Hindutva.

However, this is not just a question of political representation. The presence and work of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Konaseema are virtually unknown outside. What is unsurprising in this is that it was Kapus, a powerful Shudra caste, but with political representation incommensurate with their numbers and a yearning for power that the RSS had been working with.

While the anti-Brahmin and communist movements in Andhra had a large purchase among the educated and prosperous in the Krishna delta, it was missing in Konaseema. All these together provided a fertile ground for the Hindutva to be nurtured. During the violence following the naming of Konaseema as Dr BR Ambedkar Konaseema district, while the role of castes like Kapu and Setti Balija (a BC caste) was recorded, that of the RSS, which was behind the scenes, went unnoticed.

These efforts were replicated on the political scene, too. BJP, at one point in time, prioritised Kapus for leadership roles, including for their state presidentship. It is into this void and history Pawan Kalyan has walked into with his cult-like following. This was greatly aided by the dispersed communication technologies, helped by the fact that information technology has been the lifeline for mobility for a large section of the population across Andhra Pradesh.

This entire process is also an attempt to reverse the democratisation over the last few decades of the Hindu religious sphere in Andhra Pradesh, with an active role played by the government.

Hindutva, religion, modernity

While Hindutva rests on Muslim hatred in the north and western part of India, it is aiming to replicate it in Andhra with Christian conversion bogey. The history of Christianity in Telugu land goes back to at least five centuries, to the middle of the 16th century. It would be no exaggeration to say Christians are present today among all known castes. The syncretic nature is much visible within castes, within families, where one would be a Christian and the other a Hindu. Additionally, with the help of modern education, educated elite sections, predominantly in the Krishna delta, launched the anti-Brahmin movement in parts of the state in the 20th century. The movement also had its support through reformist, progressive Telugu movies that helped in taking it to millions through the power of celluloid. In fact, the founder of TDP and a Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, NT Rama Rao, was a product of this movement, both in movies and politics.

It was the NTR's government in 1987 that enacted the Andhra Pradesh Charitable and Hindu Religious Institutions and Endowments Act, popularly known as the Endowments Act. Through this Act, the monopolistic practices such as hereditary priesthood, hereditary trusteeship of temples, and the Miraasidaari system – where a couple of Brahmin families controlled the important functions in the temples – were abolished, and reservations for Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), Backward Classes (BC), and women were provided on the temple boards. This greatly democratised the Hindu religious institutions that would otherwise have been concentrated in a few hands. This is the religious democratisation that the Hindutva sections want to roll back, as of now, one step at a time.

All in all, Hindutva sections who have found a successful foothold in Telangana are now attempting to find a toehold in Andhra Pradesh, though here through a proxy in the form of Pawan Kalyan, who is more than willing to play the dangerous game, either wittingly or unwittingly.

Gutta Rohith is a human rights activist and Andhra Pradesh state secretary of the Human Rights Forum. Views expressed are the author’s own.