BJP has its eyes set on south India, but success is still a distant dream

It was a strange coincidence that when Prime Minister Narendra Modi met and paid obeisance to an ageing and much-revered Pejawar Mutt chief  Vishvesha Teertha Swami on July 16 in Delhi,  Karnataka appeared to be in the grip of a full-blown political crisis after the resignation of 16 legislators of the ruling coalition of the Janata Dal (Secular) and the Congress.
 
Modi met the seer — whose social influence in Karnataka, especially among the Vaishnavites, is extensive — on the occasion of Guru Purnima, which is ritually celebrated as the day of respect for teachers. The meeting was unrelated to ongoing murky politics in the state. It prima facie appeared to be a spiritual pursuit.

 
But it would be naïve to ignore the underlying politics on such occasions. Karnataka for all practical purposes has slipped away from the grip of Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy. The coalition of the Congress and JD(S) will come unstuck sooner rather than later in the face of the precarious majority of the coalition and the rebellion by MLAs. The present crisis even if it blows over temporarily is bound to recur. Indications are that Karnataka will ultimately fall in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) kitty.
 

But will not it be a pyrrhic victory for a party that occupied pole position in India politics? Perhaps the desperation of the BJP leadership to wrest control of Karnataka by any means, fair or foul, signify the party’s inability to make a lasting and deep impact in south India. Karnataka is the only exception where the BJP has been holding sway based on caste consolidation in its favour. However, the Congress is still a formidable force in the state.

 
Remove Karnataka from the scene, the BJP’s growth in Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala is uneven and not sustained. For instance, it lost badly in the Assembly polls in Telangana but recovered ground by winning four Lok Sabha seats and registering significant growth in its vote share. Much of this turnaround can be attributed to the charisma of Modi as people tend to vote separately for the national election. In Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala, the BJP found itself marginalised. In Kerala, it showed marginal improvement; the party did not win a seat despite its attempt to cash in on the Sabrimala temple row.

 
What appears to be a major impediment in its growth in south India is the BJP’s characterisation as essentially a north Indian, Hindi-speaking political formation. And despite the party’s conscious efforts to shed this branding by coopting icons from southern India, the alienation has not ceased. 
 
Conscious of this limitation, the BJP’s latest induction of B L Santosh as general secretary (organisation) is seen as a serious effort to breach the psychological barrier and win citadels of the south. Along with Santosh, there are two other general secretaries, P Murlidhar Rao and Ram Madhav, who belong to south India and have devoted much of their time to evolve a coherent political strategy for the party’s growth.

 
The party has also deployed its national secretary and strategist Sunil V Deodhar to Andhra Pradesh to identify weaknesses and plug them immediately. Deodhar, a Maharashtrian Brahmin, had led a  turnedaround in the poll scenario for the BJP in Tripura by dislodging redoubtable chief minister and CPM veteran Manik Sarkar, who had two decades of uninterrupted reign.
 
What appears to have encouraged the BJP leadership to concentrate its attention on the south is the party’s success in making inroads into the northeastern states, West Bengal, and Odisha. These bastions were considered to impregnable for the Sangh Parivar only five years back. In one of his addresses at the national executive in the 1990s, L K Advani as party president had identified east, northeast and southern India as the geographical zones where the BJP’s access was severely limited. He was then pitching for alliances with regional partners where the party had its limitation.

 
But two successive elections in 2014 and 2019 have proven the BJP’s pole position beyond doubt. Unlike the past when the party needed alliances to reach power as it did in 1998 and 1999 during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s time, the BJP now accommodates allies. What is significant is the electoral successes have whetted the BJP leadership’s desire to bring inaccessible regions in the south under its thrall. That the BJP would recalibrate its strategy in accordance with the local situation was aptly articulated by Rao when he echoed Modi’s catchphrase of “national ambition and regional aspiration” for the BJP in south India.

 
The road to the south is indeed slippery and fraught with irreconcilable contradictions which the BJP has to negotiate. Spirituality offers a surreptitious and least-resistant method of expanding one’s influence. The influence of mutts and spiritual gurus in southern states, particularly in Tamil Nadu despite the prevalence of political atheism, is quite substantial. With the full-blown crisis in Karnataka going in its favour, the BJP is all set to launch its multi-pronged strategy to make its mark in south India. It will indeed be a long haul.