Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Discovery of South India

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Discovery of South India

Harish Gupta
Jan Sangh, the predecessor of BJP, was born in the wake of a section of the people not accepting the handling of the Partition issue by Gandhi and Nehru. Since 1947 Partition affected the entire nation, it was expected that the naysayers’ voice would be heard evenly across the country.
But that did not happen. The Sangh, and BJP afterwards, has remained largely confined to the Hindi-speaking India, Gujarat on the west coast being the sole exception. BJP has been in power at the Centre for six years and is generally regarded as the party waiting in the wings. But it is almost a stranger to a good part of South India, Bengal and the entire North East.
The curfew seems to be ending at last. With the campaign of BJP’s Prime Ministerial choice Narendra Modi gathering scorching pace, it can suddenly press flesh with a new gaggle of regional leaders. Earlier, the best it could expect was a pre-poll or post-poll contract with the “big chief” of a group. BJP’s reach across the Muslim community was minuscule, if at all, while it did not particularly resonate with dalits in any state. All this worked over minds of its leaders from election to election, pushing them further into a cultural monochrome, while Congress prided itself on being inclusive, and it indeed worked in garnering votes from a multitude of communities.
For BJP, 2014 election promises to be its own discovery of India. Under Modi, it is penetrating much deeper than its old bastion of Karnataka (where it won the assembly election in 2008) and is making forays into the Tamil heartland of the southern plateau that always oscillated between DMK and ADMK. It was the anti-Brahmin movement of Periyar E. V. Ramasamy that gave rise to the twin parties of Tamil Nadu. But underneath the two majors lay strata of smaller parties who felt that they represented the lowest of the lowly in the state’s caste hierarchy. Film star Vijaykanth’s DMDK, Ramadoss-led PMK, Vaiko-led MDMK—these groups of infra-dalit are now Modi’s allies. In 1999, it was only as part of the DMK-led alliance that BJP won four seats. Now BJP is in direct arrangement with DMK’s ex-subsidiaries. The significance of this phenomenon did not expectedly miss DMK’s clever supremo M. Karunanidhi who has begun publicly showering praise on Modi, calling him “hardworking”. The nonagenarian founder leader of DMK  is obviously worried that his state’s two-horse race may end anytime soon.
However, BJP is determinedly negotiating all stumbling blocks, including opposition from within the party’s senior members, to stay in competition in the two more big-time southern states, Andhra Pradesh and Karnanataka. It has accepted back B. Sriramulu, scion of the Reddy family implicated in mining scandals, in the teeth of protest from its Rajya Sabha leader Sushma Swraj. Doubt certainly exists on the integrity of the man but there is little doubt about his ability to steer his party to victory in about eight or nine seats in an area divided between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. And, with equally unambiguous focus on realpolitik, BS Yeddyurappa, former BJP Chief Minister who had been hounded out of office and party on corruption charges as recently as 2011, was taken back and nominated, not to speak of being given the charge of guarding the party’s “gateway to South India”.
In choosing allies this time, Modi’s bandwagon is not exactly being guided by a group’s past electoral record. Instead, it is gambling on its future prospects. An example is D. Purandeshwari, NTR’s daughter and Congress MP who served as minister in the UPA government. She has recently joined BJP, much to the agony of N. Chandrababu Naidu, NTR’s sone-in-law who betrayed him and snatched power. The family tragedy has always worked in the people’s subconscious, with Purandeshwari’s entry into BJP promising to lead it to a climactic finale. Its an irony that Naidu will now do business with the BJP whom Purandeshwari opposed tooth and nail. Since the promised state of Telangana has been passed over to the new government, the Congress is looking for an ally in the state, the biggest catchment area of Congress in 2009.
In Kerala, yet another southern state where BJP’s flag hasn’t flown yet, its national executive member KJ Alphons, a former IAS officer, has been a bridge between Modi and the clerics of the Jacobite Syrian Christian church. Christians are only 19 per cent of the state’s population but their influence is much wider as they control two of its thriving service sector industries—health and education. Modi’s team is also in talks with the state’s dalit groups who are apprehensive that a proposed move to give reservation to other religious groups, Muslims in particular, may put them into trouble. It is apparent that Modi is looking at Kerala not through the conventional prism of UDF and LDF but as a new alliance of castes and communities.
In politics, as in life, alliances are made not just between individuals but among hosts of non-conflicting self-interests. The coalition-building exercise that Modi has started is a test case. After 2002 Gujarat riots, it became impossible for leaders with large Muslim support-base to continue to support BJP. But twelve years is a long time and so are old birds like Ramvilas Paswan   coming home to roost. With Paswan comes an additional appeal to dalits of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The message is surely travelling to the cerebral sections of the Muslim community. Or why should Shahid Siddiqui, the journalist, quit Samajwadi Party to become Modi’s vocal champion or Rashid Alvi looking for greener pastures ? 
Riding on the infra-dalits,
Modi  started building  
new alliances 
(The author is 
National Editor of
Lokmat group of newspapers 
at Delhi)