Tamil Nadu will witness three-cornered fights in many of its 40 constituencies in the upcoming Lok Sabha election. The DMK alliance that won the assembly polls remains in place, while the AIADMK has severed ties with the BJP. The saffron party, meanwhile, has put together its own alliance, which includes parties that it hopes will fetch votes from dominant castes, including the Gounders, Vanniyars and Thevars. For a while now, it has consolidated its vote with sections of the economically powerful Nadar community.
It is useful to contextualise the present moment with a view of history. In 1967, the DMK swept the assembly polls, unseating the Congress with the support of an alliance that included parties from across the political spectrum, from the conservative Swatantra Party to the CPI(M). Subsequently, the Congress inserted itself back into state politics by creating conditions that caused a rift in the DMK, and led to the formation of the AIADMK under MGR, and by ensuring that it remained a crucial arbiter in the electoral and political tussle between the two parties. This logic has remained in place since the 1970s, and also informs the BJP’s attempts to find its place in the state’s politics. Unsurprisingly, since the late 1990s both Dravidian parties, especially the AIADMK, have not been averse to supporting the BJP.
Given our imperfect federal polity and the manner in which the Union government has consistently eroded the constitutionally valid powers of the states, state-based political parties have to reckon with this political vortex and hold their own within it. This has made for an unabashed political opportunism, and so, ideology hasn’t quite been the glue that holds parties together.
Take the AIADMK’s relationship with the BJP, which in the past was viewed as organic and ideologically slanted. Notwithstanding the late J Jayalalithaa’s assertion of her Brahmin identity, and her ensuring that she was seen as a ‘good Hindu’, the party has not reneged on characteristic Dravidian ideals: whether this has to do with the reservation policy, welfarism, the Centre-state relationship, and its investments in ‘Tamil’ interests with regard to language, culture and education.
Even though the AIADMK might appear wavering in its stance on any or all of these issues, it continues to view them as significant and as constituting its electoral and political capital. MGR, who once contemplated reservation for the economically weaker sections, withdrew this proposed measure when he realised it would likely work against him. Both MGR and Jayalalithaa had contemplated, and the latter had executed, legislation banning religious conversion in the state. But Jayalalitha rolled back the act when she realised that she stood to lose the support of the minorities and Dalits.
Both leaders were propelled to do what they did also because they viewed themselves as representing—in a sense, embodying—the causes they supported. They were the causes they endorsed. Their political narcissism was such that, at times, it overrode ideology and party interests. They managed this self-image in and through a politics of ferocious populism: welfare, a routine affirmation of their commitment to Tamilness, and social justice on the one hand; and on the other, a systematic deployment of force and marshalling of punitive anti-terror laws to curb dissent and resistance, whether by striking workers, students, political opponents, journalists, or environmental activists.
It is perhaps to this legacy that the BJP aspires. It is as reliant on a leader who insists on being loved at all costs, is infallible and whose image cannot be sullied by any kind of critique. Its politics is informed by a fundamental disinterest in democracy and in nurturing democratic institutions. In this sense, it stands to inherit the AIADMK mantle quite well. It remains to be seen, though, how it engages with the so-called Dravidian model.
As far as social justice is concerned, the BJP has sought to co-opt various non-Brahmin castes through a mix of strategies, appealing to dominant caste interests and also to the numerically insignificant backward and other backward castes, especially of non-Tamil origin. Many of these castes are resolutely anti-Dalit, and neither Dravidian party has sought to act with the decisiveness that is required to curb caste Hindu hatred and violence. The BJP’s cultivation of these castes might well expand the culture of impunity that has remained at large in the state, as far as crimes against Dalits are concerned.
As Dalit leaders and writers have noted, this is where social justice in the state has come up against its limits. In order to downplay its insistence on Hindi as a unifying national language, the BJP has played up Modi’s love of the Tamil language and literature. It has also confounded Tamil literary pride with Tamil religiosity to counter the Dravidian celebration of secularity. This is not a particularly new move, and was attempted by popular Tamil cinema in the 1970s in order to counter the Dravidian movement’s disregard for religion and its endorsement of atheism. The point, though, is the BJP cannot countenance the coexistence of atheism and secularity along with faith—and here it appears to have consistently misread Tamil religiosity, which does not set store by a ‘national’ religion or a ‘national’ pantheon of gods.
As for education, Tamil Nadu’s opposition to the National Entrance-cum-Eligibility Test is well known. While this has earned it moral credibility, it is not clear what this means in practical terms for students from marginal social contexts who aspire to higher education. That is because private professional institutions outnumber government-run ones in the state, and these remain closed to indigent students. Yet this has made for an aspirational culture, and the BJP’s educational policy that claims to link learning to jobs in a competitive neoliberal economy might well find traction with a segment of the population.
The DMK’s assertion of the Dravidian model might yet win the day. But it is worth remembering that this model has all along sat with undemocratic practices, caste impunity and opportune politics. In this sense, the BJP will be walking on well-trodden ground, but with all the menace it can muster.
V Geetha
Feminist historian whose latest book is Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India
(Views are personal)