| ONE A week after elections were announced, people may be forgiven for thinking they are restricted to South India. That’s primarily because of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Narendra Modi; both seem to be taking the latter’s articulated target of 370 Lok Sabha seats, something the party will be able to achieve only if it puts up a good showing in the 130 seats south of the Vindhyas – 25 in Andhra Pradesh, 17 in Telangana, 39 in Tamil Nadu, 28 in Karnataka, 20 in Kerala, and one in Puducherry. In 2019, the party won only 29 of these, thanks to its showing in Karnataka, which accounted for 25. Vote shares present a more realistic picture of the party’s strength in the South: in Andhra, the BJP won less than 1% of the vote; in Karnataka, it won over 51%; in Kerala, it won almost 13%; in Tamil Nadu, it won 3.67%; and in Telangana, it won almost 20%. There have been several hypotheses as to why the BJP has been unable to make inroads into the southern peninsula barring Karnataka, where it lucked out thanks to BS Yediyurappa (he is an old RSS, and later Jana Sangh hand, and also from the most dominant community in the state), but I will restrict myself to contemporary reasons. The appeal of this version of the BJP under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah is welfarism, Hindutva, and the former’s brand equity. Two of the three do not work for it in the South, at least not as well as they do in the Hindi heartland. The only one that does is Hindutva. As Chanakya observed previously (on February 3, in a piece on the significance of the Ram temple in Ayodhya), India is now more of a Hindu state than it was previously. Welfarism doesn’t work in the South because, especially in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the governments (the UDF and the LDF in the first and the DMK and the AIADMK in the second, who have, between them, taken turns to govern the two states) have worked hard to boost social indicators; it shows, for they boast among the best social indicators in the country today. And the Modi brand, strong in the Hindi heartland and the North-East (which always throws in its lot with the dominant force in the Centre) is not as strong in the South, primarily because of the language barrier. In the long term, migration and the South’s unique demographics will change this. For instance, Tamil Nadu’s total fertility rate was 1.76 in the 2019-21 NFHS, which is lower than the replacement rate of 2.1. Already, immigrants from the eastern parts of the country account for a significant portion of its casual and industrial labour, and it isn’t inconceivable that, much like Mumbai, whose voting preferences changed as the city transformed from Bombay, some of Tamil Nadu’s industrial hubs (such as Tirupur), start choosing the BJP. In the short term, the BJP’s cause in Telangana and Tamil Nadu have been strengthened by the implosion of the BRS and the AIADMK respectively. The first lost a state election to the Congress, and is mired in corruption scandals. BRS (then TRS), won over 41% of the vote in 2019. The second, a former ally of the BJP, is no longer one, and has also suffered an internal split. Sometime in 2023, the BJP seems to have been convinced that it has a chance to grow in the state at the AIADMK’s expense. There’s already talk that its vote share could go up to 18-20% (which is what its then partner, the AIADMK, received in 2019), although it remains to be seen whether this will happen (the AIADMK may well hold on to its votes) and, if it does, whether it translates into seats. And the BJP’s cause in Andhra Pradesh has been strengthened by a partnership with the Telugu Desam Party and the Jana Sena, which received around 40% and 6% of the popular vote in the state in the 2019 Lok Sabha election (the YSRCP, which won 22 of the 25 Lok Sabha seats in the state won almost 50%, and the BJP, less than 1%). Kerala is different (which is why I am coming to it last). For decades, the state has been a project of the RSS, but despite a significant presence of RSS shakhas on the ground, Kerala has remained out of bounds for the BJP. In 2019, the Congress-led UDF won around 48% of the vote and 19 of the 20 Lok Sabha seats in the state; the CPI(M)-led LDF won around 36% of the vote and just 1 seat. This meant that the BJP’s 13% (it wasn’t as much of an achievement as was made out at the time; the party won over 10% of the popular vote in the previous elections in 2014) didn’t translate into anything. The party has some strong candidates in the fray this time – and the choice of the right candidate is one aspect of turning votes into seats – but it remains to be seen whether that means anything in a contest that remains bipolar. |
| FOUR As a people, we have always argued about everything. This week, apart from all the arguments, including in courts, on politics, business, and faith, we also managed to disagree, loudly, and openly, on food and music. In Chennai, a Sangita Kalanidhi award (it’s a big deal) to a controversial musician seems to have had the desired effect – a controversy. While the issue (like many others these days) has taken on political overtones, it’s easy to see where one side is coming from. We also managed to disagree over food, which is only to be expected in a country with among the highest proportion of vegetarians in the world – a claim that always needs to be accompanied with the disclosure that the overwhelming majority of the country eats meat – and which has also given the English language the term “pure vegetarian”. The controversy itself – a separate food delivery service for “pure vegetarians”, by people in green livery and on green bikes – has blown over following a rethink by the company in question, but what does pure data say about “pure vegetarian”? Only that there is an explanation. There is also an economic rationale. As India’s best food writer Vir Sanghvi (also one of my illustrious predecessors as editor of HT) writes in Brunch, “…though all Indian vegetarians are not economically better off than Indian non-vegetarians, a remarkably high proportion of rich people in India are vegetarians. I reckon that the majority of Indian multi-millionaires and billionaires are vegetarians.” And that poses an interesting challenge. “…as India gets richer, wealthy vegetarians do not want to feel like second-class diners eating sanitised versions of non-vegetarian dishes. They want an experience that rises above the meals offered to non-vegetarians or at the very least, one that is in the same league.” |
