Winning political capital through cultural outreach

The BJP has taken the cultural route to foray into communities and regions considered on the margins from the perspective of the 'Hindi heartland'

Inaugurating the Kashi Tamil Sangamam in Varanasi on November 19, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hoped the month-long cultural festival would help rediscover historical links between Varanasi and Tamil Nadu and foster emotional unity.

The BJP's ideological rivals argued the two-pronged objectives of the Sangamam, which concluded on Friday, were to dent the DMK's "Dravidian vs Aryan" theory and use the PM's so-called love for the Tamil language and culture to consolidate the Sangh Parivar's political capital in the state.

They pointed out how, in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP lost in most southern states for reasons other than the PM's lack of popularity. Only in Tamil Nadu did the Opposition win on an anti-Modi plank.

Also Read | Disquiet in BJP as infighting rears up in many states

The charge had seemed far-fetched until Union Home Minister Amit Shah's speech at the Sangamam's closing ceremony in Varanasi on Friday. Shah singled out the PM for his exemplary efforts to revive India's cultural unity by organising the festival. He said this was the first such exercise after India's independence. "For a long time, there were no attempts to connect the cultures of our country. Modiji has tried to connect cultures through Kashi-Tamil Sangamam. I want to thank Modiji for this," he said.

If the Sangamam is the BJP's attempt at a renewed political foray into Tamil Nadu, it was merely one of several events that Modi attended in November and December to reach out to communities and regions considered on the margins from the perspective of the 'Hindi heartland'. On November 25, the PM marked the 400th birth anniversary of legendary Asom general Lachit Barphukan who had defeated the Mughals. Modi said India remembers its unsung bravehearts lost in the pages of history, written as part of a conspiracy during the colonial era.

On November 15, the PM commemorated tribal freedom fighter Birsa Munda's birth anniversary and recalled the sacrifices of the Tana Bhagat movement and Sidhu Murmu and Kanhu Murmu. On November 1, he was at the Mangarh Dham, on the Rajasthan-Gujarat border, where the British killed 1,500 tribal people in 1913, and paid homage to Bhil freedom fighter Govind Guru.

The tribal outreach was with an eye on the Gujarat assembly polls and on Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh — all with significant tribal populations — in December 2023. In his speech on the BJP's Gujarat win, Modi underlined that the party won an unprecedented 24 of the 27 seats reserved for STs in his home state.

On November 11, the PM unveiled a 108-foot-long bronze statue of Nadaprabhu Kempegowda in Bengaluru.

In July, Modi launched the year-long 125th birth anniversary celebration of legendary freedom fighter Alluri Sitarama Raju in Bhimavaram, Andhra Pradesh. In February 2021, a year before the UP polls, he laid the foundation stone of the Maharaja Suheldev Memorial in Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh. Suheldev is thought to have defeated and killed Ghaznavid general Ghazi Mian in the 11th century and is an icon for the OBC Rajbhar caste.

Days before the polling for the Bengal Assembly in April 2021, Modi offered prayers at the Matua shrine in Bangladesh, ostensibly to reach out to the community in Bengal. In his Independence Day speech this year from Red Fort, the PM spoke of Jhalkari Bai, an associate of Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, now a Dalit icon in UP, and also Rani Chennamma from Karnataka’s Kittur.

The RSS-BJP has shown a penchant for rediscovering local historical icons in regions and among communities where they have traditionally been weak and shaping these remembrances to suit their politics.

A party leader reminisces how Shah, then the UP in charge for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls, on his visits to the state in 2013, would pore over the colonial era District Gazetteers of each district he visited. Shah would glean information on the district’s socio-cultural milieu and its religious, feudal and princely leaders.

‘Look South’ agenda

Party insiders are confident that Modi’s ‘Shaivite’ outreach would be a force multiplier for the BJP’s ‘look south’ agenda, especially in southern India with sects that worship Shiva. Organising the Kashi-Tamil Sangamam, ostensibly to bridge Kashi with Sivakasi, renovating Ujjain’s Mahakal temple in October, or the PM’s visits to Kedarnath are some of the elements in this strategy. During his visit to Karnataka in November to unveil the Kempegowda statue, interpreted widely as the BJP’s Vokkaliga outreach, the PM paid floral tributes to saint poets Kanaka Dasa and Valmiki and Onake Obavva, an 18th-century warrior.

However, Tamil Nadu is a more challenging political terrain for the BJP. The BJP-ruled Centre launched the Sangamam barely a month after the southern states were up in arms over an Amit Shah-headed Parliamentary Committee’s report on the use of Hindi, deepening misgivings about its intent.

Sahitya Akademi award-winning author and Madurai CPI(M) MP Su Venkatesan termed the BJP’s outreach a “drama”. “Modi and BJP deceive people through their actions and cheat through their words. Modi speaks highly of Tamil publicly, but his government consistently imposes Hindi on the people of Tamil Nadu in one way or the other. They never walk their talk,” he said.

Also Read | Can Modi magic help BJP sail through the coming year?

TN BJP chief K Annamalai said Modi would praise the Tamil language since his days as the Gujarat CM and that he “genuinely” likes Tamil and its civilisation. “The Varanasi festival has reinforced that spirituality was an integral part of Tamil culture, busting DMK’s lies of atheism having thrived in this part of the country,” he said.

Sanskrit vs Tamil

The Tamil parties seek to know why Sanskrit, spoken by a minuscule minority in present-day India, gets Rs 743 crore, but their language gets a paltry Rs 60 crore. But Annamalai says the primary responsibility to promote Tamil is on the state of Tamil Nadu. “I demand the DMK publish a White Paper on what it has done for Tamil since 1967 before pointing fingers at us.”

As part of the Sangamam, hundreds of Tamil religious scholars and musicians visited Varanasi. But as political commentator Radhika Ramaseshan points out, the cultural scene in Tamil Nadu is Brahmin-dominated. “Moreover, while Tamil Nadu might be one of the most religious states in the country, and its people can be deeply superstitious, religion and politics are completely divorced. No party uses religious imagery and idioms except in the context of caste when they want to run down Brahmins,” she says. Ramaseshan believes devotion to Shiva and speaking Tamil are BJP’s tools to colonise Tamil Nadu politically. “But in that case, spell your stand on Hindi instead of playing this double game (of imposing it through the backdoor),” she says.

In Tamil Nadu, the BJP wants to replace an enfeebled AIADMK, hoping the Sangamam could neutralise the DMK’s stoking of anti-Modi sentiment, while in Karnataka, it would try to make inroads into communities such as Vokkaligas. While TN could prove to be more challenging than UP, Assam or even Bengal, but under Modi, the BJP is indefatigable and single-minded in pursuing its objectives. The BJP’s ‘rediscovery’ of caste and religious icons elsewhere in the country has helped the party in its social engineering, which it is now replicating in southern India with renewed fervour.