Rethinking alliances

The AIADMK split should make BJP revisit its southern strategy

In July last year, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held its national executive meeting in Hyderabad. The objective was to revitalise its preparedness for the Telangana Assembly elections, slated for later this year, and the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The BJP had won 29 of the 130 seats in the five southern states in 2019, while its allies performed abysmally. Fourteen months later, the ideological and electoral patchwork the BJP was busy stitching for southern India has started to look shaky.

The BJP’s Tamil Nadu ally, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), exited the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) on Monday. It was upset, among other issues, at BJP state unit chief K Annamalai’s disrespect for its icons, C N Annadurai and J Jayalalithaa. The BJP’s challenge in poll-bound Telangana has perceptibly petered out, and its electoral presence in Andhra Pradesh and Kerala is nondescript. In Karnataka, its “gateway to the south”, the BJP lost its government in May. Last week, the party welcomed the Janata Dal (Secular) into the NDA, promising the latter at least four Lok Sabha seats to contest in Karnataka.

Is the south, especially Tamil Nadu, still immune to the BJP’s concoction of cultural nationalism spearheaded by backward-caste leaders in the respective states, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s charisma, and his government’s welfarism and development narrative? Last year, for example, the Centre organised the Kashi-Tamil Sangamam, which the PM inaugurated, to rekindle cultural connections between Varanasi, Mr Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency, and Tamil Nadu. The Centre later organised the Saurashtra-Tamil Sangamam, the former being a region in Mr Modi’s home state. The AIADMK’s exit would also suggest the controversy over “Sanatan Dharma”, which the BJP hopes would outmanoeuvre the Opposition elsewhere in the country, has not helped increase the BJP’s support base in the state.

However, indications are that the AIADMK-BJP divorce could be a temporary political gambit. It could help the Dravidian party shed the Hindi-Hindutva baggage because of its association with the BJP in a political milieu still imbued with the Dravidian movement. The move burnishes the AIADMK’s electoral credentials, making it attractive to potential allies, such as smaller caste-based parties, some of which are with its principal opponent. At the same time, it provides Mr Annamalai, a former Indian Police Service officer who has proved to be an energetic campaigner for the BJP, the space to work on a more long-term strategy at the cost of his party’s short-term marginalisation. The AIADMK resolution singled out the BJP’s state unit for criticism, keeping its door open for an alliance at an appropriate time with the central leadership.

The AIADMK has joined such parties as the Shiromani Akali Dal, Janata Dal (United), and Shiv Sena, which have severed ties with the NDA. This underlines the threat smaller parties perceive from a Hindutva juggernaut intent to usurp their political space or subsume their identities. As the BJP stares at the limits of its electoral expansion, it could review its 1999 performance in South India. That year, the BJP and its then ally, the Telugu Desam Party, won 36 out of undivided Andhra Pradesh’s 42 seats. The NDA won 10 in Karnataka, with the BJP winning seven, and the party won four of the six seats it contested in Tamil Nadu as a junior ally of the DMK.