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)
