Teerthahalli, April 18: Teerthahalli is a small town sitting in the green lap of the Western Ghats — a place that can be associated more with romance and poetry than with political battle.

The Assembly seat 300 km west of Bangalore is the field for the battle between the sitting BJP MLA and his Congress rival. But there is a third angle in the three-cornered contest — engineer and political novice Ram Manohar Gowda.

The full name by itself rings no bell; but read it in two parts and the names of socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia and his renowned local follower Shanthaveri Gopala Gowda emerge.

Ram Manohar is the only son of Gopala Gowda, Karnataka’s foremost socialist thinker who entered the Assembly from here in the country’s first elections in 1952.

Teerthahalli is thus the cradle of the socialists in the state. But most of them have since deserted the cause and spurned their leader Gopala Gowda’s legacy to join the Congress and the BJP.

Foremost among the former disciples are chief minister S.M. Krishna and S. Bangarappa, a long-time Congressman who recently joined the BJP.

Worse still for the socialist leader who died in the early 1970s is the ongoing no-holds-barred fight between Krishna and Bangarappa, in which the chief minister has invoked his late guru to catch votes.

“If the chief minister is here for nostalgic reasons of having married from here (Krishna’s wife Prema is a Teerthahalli native), it is all right. But he should not talk nostalgically about political ideology because, like Bangarappa, he has betrayed the spirit of Teerthahalli’s socialist legacy,” said Ram Manohar, the Janata Dal (Secular) candidate.

The residents are not taken in either and call it the battle of the “betrayers”. “Each one of them has betrayed the cause of their ideological and political guru,” a retired schoolteacher said.

They were unimpressed both by Bangarappa’s visit to an old and ailing local “socialist friend” and Krishna’s attack on his former comrade at a rally, calling him a betrayer of Gopala Gowda’s secular values. The residents have after all elected BJP’s Araga Gnanendra to the Assembly on the last two occasions.

They also know that Ayanur Manjunath, the Congress’ candidate for the Shimoga Lok Sabha seat — of which Teerthahalli is a segment — won it in 1998 as a BJP nominee.

So the irony of Krishna seeking support for Manjunath — whose long-time RSS affiliation is no secret — in the name of secularism was not lost on Teerthahalli.

H.D. Deve Gowda’s Dal (S) thus sought to take the high moral ground, but after it lost K. Ratnakar to the Congress following the announcement of his candidature from Teerthahalli.

Deve Gowda’s only option was Ram Manohar, who was fielded more for his Vokkaliga credentials than his father’s socialist legacy, thus dealing another blow to Gopala Gowda’s caste-free politics.