Artistes perform Ummathat, a Coorgi dance, in Ponnampet. (PTI)

Madikeri, May 18: Coorg gave Independent India its first commander-in-chief of the armed forces in Field Marshal K.M. Cariappa. He was succeeded by General K.S. Thimayya, another legendary figure from the region, who briefly resigned his post in 1959.

In the Assembly elections in Karnataka, if there is one community that believes it has lost out, politically and to a lesser extent, economically, it is the Coorgis.

Blame their dwindling population because as Sunil Subramani, the district BJP president, put it: “Democracy is all about numbers. The more numbers a community has, the greater its political clout.”

Delimitation worsened matters. Coorg’s three seats were reduced to two, which meant with a little luck, the new Assembly will have only two representatives who speak Kodava Takk, the language of the Coorgis.

The changing demography was reflected in the candidates the BJP and the Congress, the two main players, fielded in Madikeri and Virajpet.

While earlier the natural choice was only ethnic Coorgis, this time the parties went for Gowda candidates, one each in the two constituencies.

The Congress and the BJP nominated Gowdas from Madikeri and Virajpet respectively. So, if the Gowdas won both these seats, for the first time, the Coorgis will have no elected member in the legislature.

Coorgis are just 1 lakh from a total population of 5 lakh, which include the Tulus from neighbouring South Kanara and the Moplah migrants from Kerala.

Land fragmentation and the declining interest in agriculture forced over 3 lakh Coorgis to move from the hills to the plains of Mysore and Bangalore where their distinct identity got subsumed in the pan-Kannada one.

A sense of ennui was palpable when the subject of a separate Coorg state, alive in the seventies and eighties, was brought up. “There’s no point, we don’t have a voice,” said Mittoo Chengappa, Karnataka Congress general secretary.

Over the years, the RSS and the BJP, which are entrenched in the bordering coastal districts, propagated their Hindutva ideology, hoping that the large numbers of ex-servicemen would be drawn to its “nation-first” theory.

That hasn’t happened. “If we vote for the BJP, it is for reasons other than ideology. Their people are active and well-networked with civil society even when the party is not in power,” said K.G. Uthaya, a retired colonel.

He added: “Don’t forget the drastic blunders the BJP committed in its time — Kandahar, the Parliament attack.”

Like many other retired army officers, who tend to their coffee estates and homesteads and spend their evenings ambling through the woods or in Madikeri’s North Coorg Club, Uthaya’s concerns are more basic. He wanted the government to intervene in fixing a minimum support price (MSP) for coffee, the staple of Coorg’s economy and marketing the produce.

“There’s no MSP for coffee or pepper and cardamom, the other crops we grow,” said Uthaya.

“This year, the global price for coffee is good. Next year, it might crash. Eight years ago, when the government lifted control and released coffee in the free market, we were happy. But now we face competition from South America and Vietnam. So, there should be a statutory minimum support price so that we have the option of selling our stuff to the government,” said Uthaya.

Chengappa’s demand was that the land tenurial act, operative in the rest of Karnataka, should cover Coorg as well. “At the moment, we cannot sell our land. With fragmentation, some of us are left with just 10 or 15 acres instead of the original 100 acres which makes agriculture non-viable,” he said.