BANGALORE FOR KANNADIGAS? (Top) Vidhan Soudha, the seat of the Karnataka Assembly and (left) the International Technology Park in Whitefield, a software hub that attracts many north Indian techies

Every time a passerby gets too close to Suman Mehta’s car, she prepares to jump out and bolt. “I have to tell myself sternly that all strangers don’t mean harm,” says Mehta, a Bangalore-based entrepreneur.

Till last year, Mehta was like any other bold, outgoing youngster. This changed one May evening when she was waiting outside her husband’s information technology (IT) firm’s office to pick him up. Suddenly, three people forced opened her Maruti car’s door and stormed in. “They pushed me into the back seat, blindfolded me and drove away,” recalls Mehta.

The man in the back seat then emptied Mehta’s purse. When he did not find any credit or debit card, he said, “You north Indians make so much of money. Where are all your credit cards?” The men then drove to an isolated road, where they fled.

It took Mehta a month to venture out of home again, that too after the car was re-registered with a Karnataka number and she’d got a driver.

Mehta’s is not an isolated case. Last week, five young techies were allegedly beaten up in Bangalore for being “north Indians”, according to newspaper reports. The IT professionals were taking a post-dinner stroll near their residence in upmarket Whitefield — a short distance from the International Technology Park, the city’s software hub. They were accosted by a group of men on motorbikes who beat them and abused them, calling them, “you IT people” and “you north Indians”. The men then fled, without stealing anything.

Clearly, an us-versus-them antagonism is building up in this southern metropolis. The local Kannadigas — who constitute 35 per cent of Bangalore’s population — feel that their city is being swamped and spoilt by a growing migrant population. (There are roughly 7 lakh north Indians in Bangalore.) “There is a growing undercurrent of resentment of outsiders in Bangalore. Locals feel outsiders are living off the city’s eco system, hogging the jobs but not giving anything back to Bangalore,” says V. Ravichandar, member of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), a body set up by S.M. Krishna when he was Karnataka chief minister to improve the city’s infrastructure. Ravichandar predicts that this anti-outsider discontent will take a violent turn. “Issues like jobs and language have a tendency to blow up. Local resentment can turn violent if people find a suitable forum to fight from,” he feels.

Ravichandar’s doomsday prophecy may not be misplaced. A “Bangalore for Kannadigas” movement is gaining ground in the city. In the last five years, several pro-Kannada organisations have sprouted in Silicon City. Agni Shridhar, who founded the Karunada Sene in 2005, says organisations like his own want outsiders to learn Kannada and follow the local culture. “The problem lies with outsiders. They don’t learn the local language and culture and live like an exclusive, elitist group,” says Shridhar.

Last year, the Karunada Sene launched a campaign which urged local Bangaloreans to talk to outsiders in Kannada only. “This will force them to learn the language,” says Shridhar. Other issues on the Sene’s agenda are to get Bangalore’s IT companies to employ local people and a demand that all billboards in the city be scripted in Kannada.

To be sure, billboard scripts are a soft issue. What’s hit Bangalore’s new residents harder is the growing incidence of crime against IT professionals — seen as the face of the city’s migrant population. In 2005, Bangalore clocked a 75 per cent increase in crime, compared to the previous year.

In April this year, the body of a 24-year-old man from Meerut, Manoj Kumar, was found in Shivanasamudra, a picturesque waterfall 100 km south of Bangalore. A software professional, Kumar was new to Bangalore, lived at a paying guest accommodation and knew no one in the city. When a local, Hindi-speaking stranger offered to show him around, he jumped at the offer. The stranger invited Kumar to a weekend picnic to Shivanasamudra, where he smashed his head with a stone and fled with Kumar’s credit cards, cash and cell phone. “The boy befriended the first person who spoke his language. It was a fatal mistake,” says a local police official.

Nimish Adani learnt to stay away from strangers the hard way. In September last year, Adani — who worked as a business development manager at the Bangalore-based Logix Microsystems — went to the city railway station to see off his fiancé. “Although I had a platform ticket, I was nabbed by the ticket collector and beaten up. I was abused for being a non-Kannadiga, made to touch the railway staffs’ feet and beg for pardon,” recalls Adani. A stranger who finally offered to help tried to extract money from him, adds Adani.

Adani wrote a blog about his violent brush with Bangalore’s railway authorities and sent mass e-mails to friends in the IT industry. Even then, no one was booked for harassing him.

Stories like Adani’s have sparked off fear in the city. The Bangalore-based Independent Shoot Fighting Association (ISFA) started a self-defence training course for women called “Give It To Them” in 2002. The association has trained 7,500 women so far. IT professionals comprise the majority of the women. “Fear is building among outsiders in Bangalore. They are new to the city, hear horror stories and live on high alert,” says Ashwin Mohan, chief coach, ISFA.

Mohan says 80 per cent of the women who sign up for the course have faced harassment in the city. And most cases, he adds, have happened in Bangalore’s Koramangala, Sarjapura and Whitefield areas — or the city’s IT belt.

Bangalore’s social thinkers are convinced that the fear is a product of the growing resentment of outsiders in the city. “Bangalore’s local population is feeling excluded in its own city. This is because Kannada speakers have become a minority and have not benefited from the city’s economic boom,” says Bangalore-based social scientist Ramachandra Guha.

Yet anti-outsider movements are not new to Bangalore. Although the city is known for being very cosmopolitan, it has always had an odd voice of dissent. In the 1970s, a small-time politician, Watal Nagaraj, set up Bangalore’s first pro-Kannada organisation, the Kannada Chaluvaligaru. “But the group never won mass support,” says V.S. Shridhar, member, People’s Democratic Forum (PDF), the Bangalore-based human rights group.

Nagaraj inspired other fly-by-night groups to raise the Kannada flag. Organisations like the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike and the Kannada Sangharsha Samiti came and went. “But they remained small-time, fringe organisations,” adds Shridhar.

The riots following the Cauvery water dispute in the early 1990s were a turning point for the Kannada movement. A study by the PDF found that the riots brought a marked change in attitudes towards migrants. “The riots gave a massive push to the anti-outsider feeling. Earlier the issue was only a grumbling point,” says Shridhar.

Over the years, anti-Tamil sentiments have metamorphosed into anger against north Indians. “Attitudes have changed hugely in the last 10 years, since the IT boom and the influx of Hindi-speaking people in the city. Negativity against north Indians has increased,” says Ali Khwaja, who runs Banjara Academy, Bangalore’s oldest counselling centre.

Ill will is flying back and forth. Last month, IT executive Ganga Mathur was getting some groceries billed in a supermarket in Bangalore’s Koramangala area. “The sales person made an incorrect entry. When I checked him, he said, ‘You north Indians always create trouble’,” recalls Mathur.

Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B), professor Rajeev Gowda recalls a rumour he heard about a music concert held recently at the city’s Palace Grounds. “People were singing in several languages. The rumour goes that when the Kannada troupe went on stage, they were booed off by the North Indian IT professionals in the audience,” says Gowda.

Although Gowda took the rumour with humour, he was astonished at the animosity building in the city. “It’s a question of economics. Migrants bag the plum IT jobs and make money. The locals are left to grapple with growing unemployment and the rising costs of living. So they feel victimised,” says Gowda.

Kannada writer and film-maker Baraguru Ramchandrappa feels outsiders have come to dominate the city’s economic and social life. “The migrants have the money. All the city’s new malls, multiplexes and real estate builders are out to woo them. The locals feel left out,” he says.

A visit to Whitefield on Bangalore’s outskirts — where a construction boom is underway —proves Ramchandrappa’s point. “The high-end villas and luxury apartments being built in Whitefield are targeted at the dollar-totting techie. Most people buying property here are migrants,” says Gayatri Nayak, proprietor, Manipal Consultancy Services, a city-based real estate firm.

Both Suman Mehta and Ganga Mathur have bought upscale flats in Whitefield. Even then, they don’t feel at home in the city. When they meet a stranger, they try to hide their Hindi-speaking identity — a telling comment on the fear that now stalks this garden city.