Mandate 2024 | Can BJP storm the south?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the rare ability to visualise the big picture and then, like an artist, proceed to execute it stroke by stroke. As he told India Today in an interview last December, “When I start something, I know the endpoint. But I never announce the final destination or blueprint in the beginning. There is a progressive unfolding of my vision and plans.” On April 9, 10 days before the voting date in Tamil Nadu, the prime minister held a massive road show in Chennai that wended its way through T. Nagar in the heart of the city and, just as it was about to end, declared: “Chennai has won me over.”

The symbolism of the route the prime minister took for his rally wasn’t lost on Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, who is also the president of the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and heads the eight-party Secular Progressive Alliance (SPA) that is collectively contesting the 39 Lok Sabha seats in the state. At a public meeting in Dindigul the next day, the CM thundered, “Dear PM, do you know how T. Nagar, the place you held your road show yesterday, got its name? It’s named after a Justice Party leader. It’s a Dravidian fort and you think you can showcase your work there?” The Justice Party, founded in 1916, is thought of as the progenitor of the Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu, among whose founders was Theagaraya Chetty after whom T. Nagar is named. That movement turned political with the formation of the DMK in 1949, which, along with its splinter group—the All India Anna DMK (AIADMK)—has ruled the state alternately since 1967. No national party—not even the Cong­ress—has been able to shake their hold till date.

For Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Tamil Nadu is the biggest southern citadel that they have yet to breach along with neighbouring Kerala, which sends 20 MPs to the Lok Sabha. Both states go to the polls in the first two phases of the general election, on April 19 and 26, as does Karnataka for half of its 28 seats. In the 10 years that it has been in power under PM Modi’s leadership, the BJP has yet to win big in the five southern states of Tamil Nadu (39 seats), Karnataka (28), Andhra Pradesh (25), Kerala (20), Telangana (17) and the Union territory of Puducherry (1). Of their combined 130 seats, it won only 29 in the 2019 general election, 25 were from Karnataka alone and four from Telangana. The party drew a total blank in the 85 seats in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra and Puducherry. The overall strike rate in the South was a poor 22 per cent in the seats it contested. Ironically, it was its best ever showing—in 2014, it won 21 seats.

BJP’s Mission 50 in the South

With the BJP targeting a win in 370 seats on its own this election compared to the 303 it won in 2019 and hoping to cross, along with its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners, a mammoth 400, the saffron party not only needs to retain its previous tally but add to it. Drawing a blank in the 85 seats as it did last time will instantly bring down the number of winnable seats to 458 from 543. The party will then need a strike rate of 87 per cent, a formidable task by all means. The BJP and NDA will have to add another 20 seats to their 2019 tally of 29 to make ‘char sau paar’ a reality. Hence Mission 50, the objective of their southern assault.

Tamil Nadu CM M.K. Stalin addressing a DMK/ I.N.D.I.A. bloc rally in Chidambaram, Apr. 6; (Photo: Raj Chengappa)

Tamil Nadu remains key in the BJP’s plans to get the 20 additional seats. Join the sundry dots, and you realise PM Modi and his party have been systematically working to win over the state ever since their second term began. Thus, in October 2019, the PM chose the coastal tourist city of Mamallapuram for his summit meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, where they chalked out a “Chennai Connect” to improve relations. The prime minister even dressed the part on the occasion, wearing a veshti (dhoti), white shirt and a brocade thundu (scarf) as he proudly took Xi around at an exhibition that showcased Tamil culture at the summit venue. Then, while inaugurating the new Parliament building in September 2023, Modi installed the sengol, a gold-plated silver sceptre that a Tamil organisation had gifted India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru on the eve of Independence and which had found its way to the Allahabad Museum. More recently, at the Kashi Tamil Sangamam event in December 2023 in Varanasi, the prime minister made it a point to have his speech translated simultaneously into Tamil using artificial intelligence.

Symbolism apart, Modi, along with home minister Amit Shah and party president J.P. Nadda, also devised a concrete game plan to revamp the Tamil Nadu unit of the BJP. It began with installing the feisty former IPS officer K. Annamalai as the president of the state unit—at 39, the youngest ever of its party chiefs in the state. No one understood the brief better than him, or executed it with more systematic precision. After the DMK swept the 2021 assembly election, the BJP, which won only four of the state’s 234 seats, began to seriously rethink its alliance with the AIADMK. Annamalai, ever the able lieutenant, embarked on an aggressive campaign not just against the ruling DMK in the course of his statewide padayatra, but also the AIADMK, the party’s alliance partner, which eventually ended in a breakdown of communication. By September 2023, the BJP got what it wanted—the AIADMK broke off its alliance with the saffron side, to preserve its Dravidian identity.

Stitching Alliances

Free of the AIADMK, the BJP took the high-risk decision of forming its own alliance in Tamil Nadu and heading it, a first for it. The party is now contesting 19 seats on its own—14 more than in 2019—and has given the remaining 20 to alliance partners. The BJP’s calculation is that with AIADMK heading for a meltdown, it has a chance to emerge as the principal opposition in the state. The fact that the prime minister himself has made more than seven trips to Tamil Nadu since January, and addressed over 11 rallies, signals how much the BJP is willing to invest in the state to achieve its objectives.

(Graphic: Tanmoy Chakraborty)

As RSS ideologue S. Gurumurthy, the current editor of the legendary Tamil political weekly Thuglak, points out, “The AIADMK vote bank consists of both anti-DMK votes at the state level and anti-Congress ones at the national level. So, any meltdown within the party could lead to the BJP gaining from it and emerging as the prime challenger to the DMK.” Gurumurthy believes the era of Dravidian supremacy, which had its genesis in the 1950s and ’60s, is coming to an end. Most of its stalwarts are ageing or dead, and its dynastic predilections have resulted in lacklustre leadership. He therefore finds the conditions ripe for a national party like the BJP with a strong “development-oriented local leader” to make major inroads into the state.

Except that the DMK- and Stalin-led SPA will be no walkovers. For one, Stalin’s election campaign is immaculately planned and executed. In the temple town of Chidambaram where he held a massive rally, the dais was in the shape of the old Parliament building with pictures not just of erstwhile DMK leaders but also of allies, including Sonia Gandhi and Rahul. His speeches are precisely worded where he berates the BJP for its autocratic ways and plays up the 25 welfare guarantees the I.N.D.I.A. alliance has promised to implement if it comes to power. It is a commanding performance that gives his supporters the confidence to take on the mighty BJP. The party can at best push its own vote share beyond 15 per cent and with allies to 20 per cent to emerge as the principal challenger to the DMK when the 2026 assembly polls come around.

There are two other states where the BJP has struck alliances with parties to beef up its numbers. In Andhra Pradesh, where the party drew a blank in 2019, it moved swiftly to patch up with old regional ally—the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), headed by the ageing warhorse Chandrababu Naidu. It hopes to ride piggyback on the TDP, which won a mere three out of 25 seats in 2019, but has teamed up with actor Pawan Kalyan’s Jana Sena Party. The BJP will be contesting just six seats under the banner of the NDA, but hopes to possibly open its own account while gaining from the numbers of its alliance partners. It will be a tough ask, given that they are ranged against the formidable Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP) leader and Chief Minister Jagan Reddy. With the assembly election being held simultaneously, Jagan is putting up the fight of his life to win a second term.

In Karnataka, the BJP’s lone outpost in the South till now where it lost the plot and was worsted by the Congress in the summer assembly poll of 2023, the party has moved with alacrity to make amends. To retain its 2019 tally of 25 seats, it has tied up with another old ally, the Janata Dal Secular (JDS), headed by former chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy, son of former prime minister Deve Gowda. Not only has the BJP conceded three seats to the JD(S) in its Vokkaliga stronghold to thwart the Congress, but also revamped the party organisation by making B.Y. Vijayendra, son of former chief minister B.S. Yediyurappa, president of the state unit, to win over the sizeable Lingayat vote that had been unhappy with Yediyurappa’s removal in 2021 and had backed the Congress in the assembly election. The party is also pinning its hopes on PM Modi’s popularity to give it a decisive push and cut the ascendant Congress in the state. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has delivered on the guarantees the party had promised and is looking to win more than the one seat his party won in 2019.

Missing a Trick

Ditto in Telangana, where the Congress edged out the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) led by the charismatic A. Revanth Reddy in the November 2023 assembly election. Both the BJP, which won four out of the state’s 17 seats in 2019, and the Congress, which won three, are looking to gain from the diminishing of the BRS, which had a tally of nine the last time round. The BJP may have missed a trick in allowing the Congress to walk away with the state in the assembly election but is putting up a hard fight now to retain the seats it won last time, and add a few more.

In Kerala, a fortress that has proved impregnable, the BJP is contesting 16 of the state’s 20 seats, hoping that its double-digit vote share of 13 per cent last time converts into a seat or two. Hence, its fielding of high-profile leaders like Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, relatively new faces and experimental candidates. As elsewhere, the game plan here, too, is to slowly erode support for the weaker local party—at present the Congress.

What the BJP hasn’t been able to crack in the South is the salience of the regional parties. Their fierce protection of linguistic and cultural pride and articulation of people’s sentiments have enabled them to grow as strong forces. The South’s tradition of issue-based politics, higher conformity to the rule of law and strong assertion of federal rights vis-à-vis the Centre sync with its extra sensitivity to subjects like excessive centralisation. As the South outperforms the North on economic and social indicators, the challenges of fiscal federalism have increased and fostered the perception of a North-South divide. The South is increasingly feeling that it is not getting a fair share of benefits, given its contribution to tax revenues, a notion Modi and the BJP have been unable to dispel. If anything, their war cry of char sau paar has only deepened the suspicion and unease. This is what makes Mission 50 that much harder for the BJP. Will its bid to storm the South remain a pipe dream then? Weighing in on the question, psephologist and CVoter founder-director Yashwant Deshmukh says, “The BJP is poised to increase its vote share, but it may not convert into more seats. This is a long-term game for it.” The next two weeks of campaigning will determine whether the party conquers the South.

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