India’s political map has cracked further after the recent Assembly polls in five states. While South India is ‘BJP-mukt’, barring Puducherry, North India is ‘Congress-mukt’, barring Himachal Pradesh. The BJP controls western India, but the east presents a mixed picture, with Trinamool Congress in Bengal, Biju Janata Dal in Odisha, and a Mahagathbandhan in power in Bihar. With the BJP sweeping to power in the three Hindi heartland states but remaining a distant third in Telangana, the geographical fragmentation of the polity appears even more pronounced.
The personality of Prime Minister Modi dominated the BJP’s 2023 campaign in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Telangana. The BJP consciously did not project any chief ministerial face and ran a Modi-centric campaign, which paid off handsomely for the party in the north but not in Telangana.
There are three planks to Modi’s immense popularity in the north: One, Hindutva politics and Modi’s persona as an unapologetic Hindu nationalist; two, Modi’s anti-elite OBC identity, which resonates with the post-Mandal movement backward caste social revolution in North India; and three, projecting Modi as the ‘vikas purush’ or someone who will usher in blitzkrieg development in long-neglected regions.
All three of these planks face structural barriers in the south. First, the appeal of Hindutva centering around the `Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan’ formula is limited in states with proud linguistic, devotional, and cultural traditions. The imposition of Hindi language is an explosive issue. Anti-Hindi language riots have taken place since the 1930s in Tamil Nadu, where Brahmanical Hindutva also faces serious social interrogation. In Karnataka recently, voices were raised over the fate of Kannada and the teaching of Hindi in schools.
Nor does Hindu-Muslim rhetoric strike a chord in a more harmonious civil society. When BJP rabble-rouser Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma vowed to change the name of Hyderabad to Bhagyanagar within an hour of coming to power, a pushback was inevitable in a city with a large, educated Muslim population.
Second, OBC politics in the south long predates the Mandal revolution of the north. In Tamil Nadu, backward caste empowerment through the Dravida movement was already well-established by the time the Mandal movement of the late 1980s got underway. Modi as a galvanising symbol of an anti-upper caste upsurge does not work because such symbols already exist in plenty.
The appeal of Modi as ‘vikas purush’ is not so potent either. State leaders in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have already laid claim to the ‘development guru’ mantle. Jayalalitha fast-tracked Tamil Nadu’s industrial boom. Chandrababu Naidu built Hyderabad into an IT powerhouse. LDF and UDF both take credit for Kerala’s high health and education rankings.
The BJP’s footprint somewhat resembles the ancient Mauryan and Ashokan empires which bestrode north and west but were unable to penetrate far south. This is not surprising given the geographical homeland of the RSS-Jana Sangh-BJP. Founded in Nagpur, the RSS first expanded in the Hindi belt and Punjab. The BJP’s political ancestor, the Jana Sangh, grew rapidly in UP and MP, thanks to its general secretary Deendayal Upadhyaya who worked tirelessly in UP. Jana Sangh’s political star Atal Bihari Vajpayee hailed from Gwalior, as did its later stalwart Vijaya Raje Scindia.
While the Jana Sangh consolidated itself in North India, the southern states remained Congress bastions or dominated by regional heroes. In the 1977 post-Emergency elections, the Indira Gandhi-led Congress was routed in the north, but won over 120 seats in the south.
In Tamil Nadu, the Dravidian giants DMK and AIADMK have dominated since the 1960s. In Kerala, the Left has entrenched itself against the Congress. Andhra Pradesh saw the rise of the NTR cult for a decade in the 1980 to 1990s but in the 2004 and 2009 general elections, Andhra voters stood with the Congress. Indira Gandhi’s “Indiramma” appeal endured in Karnataka even after the Emergency, and she scripted her stunning comeback in 1978 from Chikkamagaluru. In the 1980s, the anti-Congress vote in Karnataka went not with BJP but coalesced around the Ramakrishna Hegde-led Janata Party.
Except for former Karnataka CM B S Yeddyurappa, the BJP has not been able to build mass leaders in the south. In Karnataka, the BJP played Lingayat-centric politics and used a dominant caste to tap into anti-Congressism. Within the Sangh Parivar, many South Indian faces have risen to prominence and RSS shakhas have grown exponentially even in Kerala. Yet, the BJP has no popular mass leaders in the south.
Conversely, the Congress has many South Indian talents, like son-of- the-soil mass leader Siddaramaiah, feisty activists like A Revanth Reddy, and resourceful organisation men like D K Shivakumar. In the north, the Congress talent pool has shrunk badly and is populated by senior citizens. Ashok Gehlot has been the Rajasthan face for decades, as has been Digvijay Singh in MP. There is tremendous irony in Rahul Gandhi pitching for OBC representation through a caste census, but making an upper caste Punjabi Khatri, Kamal Nath, the face of the MP campaign. In the north, the Congress’ ground organisation has taken a debilitating hit from counter-mobilisations of Mandir and Mandal. Judging from the two big victories in Karnataka and Telangana in the space of a few months, clearly, Congress’ organisational networks in the south remain robust.
North and south are thus on different trajectories, and the divergence may well reflect in the Lok Sabha polls of 2024. The BJP can hope to get only a small share of the seats in the south, although its dominance in the north gives it a huge advantage. The delimitation exercise post-2026 could vastly increase the north’s seat numbers and political clout. In this situation of the BJP’s northern supremacy, the southern contrast is not at all a bad thing. It means that political and electoral competitiveness remains alive and well, and multi-party democracy at the state level stands as a challenge to the BJP’s domineering ‘one-nation-one-party-one- leader’ campaign.
(The writer is a senior journalist and commentator based in Delhi)