“What Tejasvi did in the war room was totally wrong,” said senior BJP leader Uday Garudachar. “He is not supposed to do these things.”

Garudachar, 58, an MLA from Chickpet constituency, was describing the controversial events of May 5, when the BJP’s Bangalore South MP Lakya Suryanarayana Tejasvi, 28, barged into a south zone war room, pulled out a list, and read out 17 names – all Muslim.

Of the 204 staffers in the war room, which was set up to assess, inform and attend to the different needs of people especially Covid patients, Surya claimed that it was these 17 men who were part of a bed allotment scam. The men were promptly removed from their jobs and, despite a police probe that proved Surya’s allegation to be baseless, the men continue to remain jobless, scared and stripped of their dignity.

Surya later said that he did not create the list of names and merely read out from a piece of paper handed to him by the municipality chief. Gaurav Gupta, the head of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, was not available for comment.

But who really put together this “list” of Muslims? Why was it created at all? The answers to these questions remain a mystery.