The legacy of Tipu Sultan’s incursion into North Kerala in the 18th century has emerged as the subject of a bitter electoral back-and-forth in the high-profile Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency.
On Thursday, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) State president K. Surendran, who is fighting Congress’s Rahul Gandhi and Communist Party of India’s Annie Raja, in Wayanad, put the cat among the pigeons by stating that he would rename Sultan Bathery town as “Ganapathy Vattom” if elected to the Lok Sabha.
The current controversy has its roots in the arrival of Tipu’s forces in erstwhile Malabar in 1789. The Mysore ruler’s forces purportedly used the precincts of Ganapathy Vattom temple as an arms depot. The Sultan Bathery town draws its name from the historical encampment chronicled by the British.
