The year was 2015. Tamil Nadu politics was still dominated by M Karunanidhi and J Jayalalithaa. The then BJP president Amit Shah flew to Madurai to attend a meeting where he endorsed the demand by seven sub-sects of Scheduled Castes (SC) to be recognised as Devendrakula Vellalars.
The sub-sects had been raising the demand for decades, but no political party had actively supported their cause. The BJP, which had set its eyes beyond the Vindhyas after the emphatic Lok Sabha election victory of 2014, saw an opening and grabbed the opportunity.
Thus, began the BJP’s bid to breach the Dravidian fort.
Six years later, in February this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at an event in Chennai that he was fulfilling the demand with his government’s decision to group the seven communities under Devendrakula Vellalars. That the announcement has caused resentment among other communities in the state and may work against the BJP is a different story altogether.
The BJP started off well in its attempt to make inroads into Tamil Nadu. It reached out to communities that felt politically ignored or marginalised by the state’s two major political parties, and it projected itself as an alternative to the Dravidian ideology parties.
In fact, the gates for new political players opened after the death of Jayalalithaa in 2016, even as age-related illnesses confined Karunanidhi to his house the same year (and he eventually passed away in August 2018).
But then the BJP began to adopt a negative strategy. Instead of strengthening the party at the grassroots level and expanding its own base, political observers point out, the party – long seen and suspected south of the Vindhyas as a Hindi-Hindutva party -- began fishing in the troubled waters of the AIADMK, in what appeared over time to be a ‘break and fix’ strategy – attempting to break the ruling party or unite its factions as and when it suited the BJP.
The BJP’s adventurism with the AIADMK has continued right up to date, with it proposing barely a fortnight ago to bring together the Edapaddi Palaniswami-O Pannerselvam faction, which rules the state currently, and the faction loyal to the just-out-of-jail V K Sasikala. Chief Minister Palaniswami put his foot down, and ensured that the BJP’s plan did not take off, at least for now.
At other times, the saffron party has gone out of the way to help the AIADMK government survive, especially during the two years that the Palaniswami government was precariously placed, with only a wafer-thin majority. Analysts say the BJP may have been tempted to forget about building its own base for a while and instead to ride on the back of its ally. Perhaps it thought that in time, it could do to the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu what it did to the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra or the JD(U) in Bihar. But politics in the Dravidian land has proved to be a different ball game for the BJP, at least so far.
While the saffron party was busy in trying to solve the “crisis” in the AIADMK, anti-BJP sentiments were simmering in the state. Massive protests organised to oppose Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Chennai in April 2018 against his government’s delay in establishing the Cauvery Management Board (CMB) turned into an anti-Modi wave, which eventually sunk the AIADMK-BJP ship in the state in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
“The BJP thought that the AIADMK would scatter into many pieces, that did not happen. Nor did its plan to break the party. The AIADMK has survived for four years, and BJP is still waiting, exploring whom to cut and slice and come in,” says Prof Ramu Manivannan, HoD, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Madras.
With all its strategies, most importantly that of propping up Rajinikanth, ending up in smoke, BJP seems to have finally realised its position and agreed to contest in just 20 of the 234 seats in the coming Assembly election. But it leaves no opportunity to publicly stress that the next dispensation will be a coalition government, much to the discomfiture of its senior partner, the AIADMK.
A close look at the list of seats the BJP has fielded its candidates for gives a sneak peek into its future plans – identifying pockets where it can get a foot in the door and tapping communities that could help it grow electorally.
The party will contest in five seats in western Tamil Nadu, eight in the southern region, two in Chennai, and the remaining five in other parts of the state. In western Tamil Nadu or Kongu region, the BJP fancies its chances as it feels the entrepreneurial Gounders, one of the most dominant communities, have a soft corner for the party.
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It hopes the Devendrakula Vellalars issue will result in electoral dividends in southern Tamil Nadu, where it is already attempting to consolidate the Hindu votes. A couple of districts in the region have large minority populations. It’s tempting to attempt polarisation.
“The BJP again has chosen urban areas to contest. They have chosen only a few seats in the rural areas, knowing that they do not have enough cadre base. It is not easy to create a cadre base in just a few years. But what the BJP should also understand is that Dravidian politics is exactly opposite to its brand of politics,” political analyst P Ramajayam said.
Modi faced the maximum protests, on ground and on social media, in Tamil Nadu in 2018 and 2019. Things did change after the BJP’s humiliating performance in 2019, when it lost all five Lok Sabha seats it contested by huge margins. There have been no major protests against Modi since.
Yet, the BJP has seemed unwilling to go to the people to establish a base for itself. Instead, it revived hopes of riding on Rajinikanth’s popularity while remaining in alliance with AIADMK. It was hoping to float an alternative front to DMK and AIADMK by allying with Rajinikanth. The superstar put paid to those hopes when he finally ended dilly-dallying over his long-awaited political entry and declared that he would not take the plunge, citing health reasons.
The ruling AIADMK has, meanwhile, kept stomaching all humiliation heaped on it only because it is vulnerable to the pulls and pressures of the BJP as it is the ruling party at the Centre.
In a way, the consistency in the BJP’s strategy has been its inconsistency. Modi was actively “promoting” Tamil on global platforms, though it goes against the BJP’s DNA, while his cabinet colleagues were busy replying to Tamil MPs in Hindi, a language the latter cannot comprehend.
Meanwhile, as the party’s visibility increased post-2019, it kept finding ways to make headlines: It roped in former Karnataka-cadre IPS officer K Annamalai, touted to be the party’s future face in Tamil Nadu as he hails from the Gounder community. It has also attracted many celebrities, former bureaucrats and even journalists.
The party took a conscious decision to shed its upper caste tag by handing over leadership of the state unit to L Murugan, a Dalit, and has even managed to poach two DMK leaders – V P Duraisamy and Ku. Ka. Selvam. However, its temptation to play politics of religion neutralised any gains that were made. The provocation was a derogatory video released by a YouTube channel on Kandha Shashti Kavasam, a devotional song dedicated to Lord Murugan, considered the native god of Tamils.
The state unit organised the hitherto unknown ‘Vel Pooja’ (worshipping of the spear of Lord Murugan) and began doing what it does best – undertaking yatras in the name of god.
“Finally, the BJP has realised that caste, community and Periyar-ism will play a significant role in moulding the public mind. It has realised that it is not enough if it merely plays the Hindu card. Polarising the people of Tamil Nadu is a different cup of tea, and they are seeing it now,” senior journalist R Bhagwan Singh, who has covered Tamil Nadu for four decades, said.
The Vetrivel Yatra, whose objective was to “unmask” people behind the YouTube channel, ended up exposing the BJP’s own fault lines. With no major cadre base and being left in the lurch by the AIADMK government, which played hardball by refusing permission for the yatra, it ended in a failure.
Though Vetrivel Veeravel (a slogan raised by devotees of Lord Murugan) still resonates in the BJP campaign, the party has now gone silent on the issue, realising that politics in the name of religion won’t help it in Tamil Nadu.
“It will continue to fail because Tamil Nadu continues to be a Dravidian bastion. Religion does not function the same way here as it does in other parts of the country,” Prof Manivannan said.
Cut to the April 6 election. The BJP has made enough noise in the run-up to the polls. Will its new-found visibility help the party win seats in Tamil Nadu? We will know on May 2.