The Bharatiya Janata Party’s formulaic approach to extend its sphere of influence to States outside of the Hindi heartland, as seen in one-liners such as ‘BJP 44-plus in Jammu and Kashmir’, to indicate the simple majority needed to form a government in that State, was >repeated in Tamil Nadu during the past weekend, paralleling the saffron party’s Christmas-holiday row in a mixed southern milieu. A banner near the stage for national president Amit Shah’s fairly big rally at Maraimalai Nagar near Chennai sported the slogan, ‘BJP 122-plus’, hinting at the numbers the BJP would need to form a government of its own in Tamil Nadu. Interestingly, Maraimalai Nagar had its political baptism when in May 1988 the Congress (I) under Rajiv Gandhi held an AICC session there to chalk out a rejuvenation plan for the Congress. It is a venue the saffron ideologues were only too eager to grasp. The BJP’s aggressive foray into this bastion of Dravidian politics is not surprising, but the saffron party cobbling up an eleventh-hour alliance for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls with a medley of smaller regional parties and caste-based outfits had little impact. It is not so much the method or the politics of electoral strategising that is of concern here in an open society, as a seemingly hammer-blow, micro-level approach the BJP’s Gen-Next leadership seemed to have fashioned after its Lok Sabha election victory.
In fact, Mr. Shah asserted that an additional 60 lakh membership for the BJP, under the banner of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s development agenda, is all that it would take to give the BJP an edge to lead a political alternative to both the DMK and the AIADMK in the State in the run-up to the 2016 Assembly elections, particularly in a context where key leaders of the main Dravidian parties are embroiled in legal tangles. With the two major parties in the State each holding over 25 to 40 per cent of the vote share, rising from a single-digit share to a viable alternative is a daunting task. Nonetheless, other parties in Tamil Nadu will be missing the wood for the trees if they fail to see in Mr. Shah’s nonchalant approach a real wake-up call to seriously re-explain to the people their traditional USP — development with secularism and a measure of equity. While the BJP seeks to replay the time-tested strategy in the State of co-opting OBCs and film personalities — former Union Minister and a film actor until some years ago, D. Napoleon, quitting the DMK to join the BJP is an instance of that trend — the other parties in the ideological space that goes beyond the insular confines of ‘cultural nationalism’ have a more creative and daunting task ahead to show that politics and society cannot be reduced to mere formulae.
