Most of north India has suddenly discovered – thanks to Udayanidhi Stalin’s remarks on Sanatan Dharma – that it is perfectly all right for mainstream political parties in Tamil Nadu to use shrill anti-Hindu rhetoric.
For all the talk about the BJP using Udayanidhi’s remarks to hurt the political prospects of the INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) bloc partners north of the Vindhyas, it can be said with a lot of certainty that even the highest leadership of the BJP will not dare criticise E V Ramasamy or Periyar – he pioneered the militant rationalist Dravidian politics that the likes of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) are offshoots of – in Tamil Nadu.
Periyar’s well-documented remarks against Hindu religion and gods would make Udayanidhi’s comments sound like nursery rhymes.
Having set the historical political record straight, it is important to ask another question: Did Udayanidhi make these remarks inadvertently without realising their political consequences outside the state or was it an act of deliberately setting the cat among the pigeons?
A recently released Tamil film, Maamannan, where Udayanidhi himself is the protagonist as well as its producer, might help us answer this question.
Maamannan is the political story of a Dravidian party purging upper caste chauvinists from within its ranks. The purge is driven by a bottom-up assertion when Dalits including those in the party’s leadership begin to question the institutionalised caste violence and humiliation practised by the upper caste leadership within the party.
While one can debate whether or not Udayanidhi’s Sanatan Dharma remarks were scripted, there is no denying that Maamannan’s political imagery of Udayanidhi – he is a young man from the Dalit community who continues to rear pigs (a profession widely looked down upon) despite being the son of an MLA – is conscious political messaging.
His Sanatan Dharma remarks could very well have been a dialogue in the film.
What is Udayanidhi or the DMK trying to achieve through the narrative of Maamannan? One can answer this question in multiple ways.
The most obvious answer is that the movie is trying to make a genuine outreach to the Dalit vote base in the state, which continues to face caste violence from dominant castes – to be sure, most of them could be classified as Other Backward Classes (OBC) in the state – who might be seen as close to the ruling establishment.
In fact, the film’s political resolution of the Dalit leadership question after the purge is successful is interesting.
Maamannan, the Dalit MLA whose son is played by Udayanidhi, is made the speaker of the assembly, a position which can be associated more with a historical quest for dignity rather than power in the realpolitik sense of the term.
Is the DMK offering hitherto unachievable dignity to the Dalit voters in exchange for continued or bigger support to the party (and family)?
The film’s imagery could also be an attempt to tacitly discredit the BJP and its allies, given the fact that the former is seen as close to the upper caste, and a thoroughly, politically disenfranchised clique in the state.
There is, of course, another way to look at the entire issue.
Anyone who has followed India’s motion picture landscape will agree that there has been an organic growth in statements and assertions by historically deprived castes, including Dalits, in movie content and narratives.
This assertion is particularly strong in Tamil Nadu and Maamannan’s director Mari Selvaraj is one of the leading voices, pushing this assertive narrative.
One can argue that this subaltern assertion in the entertainment industry is the result of the upward mobility boosted by India’s first-generation social reform – reservations and political representation – and what it has given to socially disadvantaged groups, especially Dalits.
That Tamil Nadu has seen among the highest upward mobility for the socially weaker groups and is also one of the most successful stories of capitalist growth in India strongly suggests that they have played a role in generating the economic ballast for generating a Dalit and a wider subaltern class, which can speak for itself in an industry which did not bestow such agency to this social class earlier.
By aligning itself with this new social assertion, the DMK is only using existing opportunities for political propaganda. The word propaganda has been used here as a form of political praxis rather than a pejorative.
In fact, it can be argued that by investing in such propaganda, the DMK is trying to avoid the fate of parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which have seen a sharp attrition of Dalit voters from its ranks to the BJP.
A big reason for the BSP’s failure to prevent the erosion of its support base is that its politics overinvested in the cause of reservations (which even the BJP now says will never be taken away) and to some extent justice without working on alternative socio-cultural praxis to fight Hindutva in the realm of the social.
The BJP-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), on the other hand, have been prudent enough to make long-term investments to attract subalterns (especially Dalits and tribals) to their ranks without rushing into immediate political outreach.
For those who are interested, political scientist Tariq Thachil’s book Elite Parties Poor Voters: How Social Services Win Votes in India provides an insightful discussion on this issue.
To be sure, the BSP is not the only party which has lost support to the Right wing because of identity and culture-related issues.
The rise of the Shiv Sena at the cost of the Left in the aftermath of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement – which demanded a separate state of Maharashtra for the Marathi-speaking people – or the large-scale shift of left voters to the BJP in West Bengal in the post-2014 period are more such examples.
Given these examples, the DMK’s decision to go on a cultural offensive does not sound like an arbitrary idea.
Does this mean that there is nothing wrong with such a strategy?
The BJP can never discredit Dravidian icons such as Periyar and their anti-Hindu rhetoric in states such as Tamil Nadu. This argument holds even though many on the ground in the state might not subscribe to militant atheism anymore.
However, it is equally unimaginable to envisage a situation where the RSS-BJP’s cultural hegemony in north India will be threatened by such anti-religious polemics.
The BJP, in fact, will be hoping to fully exploit Udayanidhi’s remarks to create trouble among the INDIA bloc partners in north Indian states including those that are not Hindi speaking.
While the intellectual traction for such an assertion exists beyond the geographical limits of Tamil Nadu or southern India, it has very little political resonance or appetite on the ground.
Is there a larger takeaway beyond immediate electoral calculations?
Hindutva’s rising rhetoric and assertion will increase the temptation for Dravidian politics to harden its own cultural rhetoric but the latter will not have the numerical strength to take on the former when it comes to parliamentary contests.
This sense of alienation will increase manifold when the delimitation question comes up, which could put a bigger squeeze on the weight of southern states in the legislative arm of the Indian state.
The conflict which will erupt when these questions come to the fore will not be confined to television studios alone.
Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.
The views expressed are personal
