South remains elusive for BJP despite big gains in other states. What data shows

E-PaperSubscribeSubscribeEnjoy unlimited accessSubscribe Now! Get features like The Bharatiya Janata Party, which pulled off an impressive win in West Bengal, retained power in Assam and is part of the ruling coalition in Puducherry, is now in power, either on its own or with allies, in 22 of the 31 states and UTs. The number of BJP legislators across the country, too, has doubled since 2013, from 773 to 1798. But as it increases its footprint across the country, there is still a frontier that the party aspires to breach — the South. Union Minister JP Nadda, BJP Tamil Nadu President, Nainar Nagendran, and BJP leader K. Annamalai released the election manifesto for the Tamil Nadu assembly polls in Chennai last month. (ANI File)Barring Karnataka, where the party has been in power previously (it formed the government for the first time in 2008) and in Andhra Pradesh, where its ally, the Telugu Desam Party, is in power, electoral success has eluded the party in Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Kerala. The party’s attempts to gain a toehold in these states bore no results on Monday, and it had to settle for three seats in Kerala and one in Tamil Nadu. The BJP has been working assiduously to expand its footprint south of the Vindhyas. In 2016, the party drew up a plan to overcome the barriers it faced in the southern and eastern states that made up the Coromandel belt, and has achieved some success in implementing it; it is already in power in Odisha and now West Bengal, and hopes to regain Karnataka in 2028. Party leaders who spoke on condition of anonymity conceded that leadership and the cadre on the ground are still a work-in-progress. And there is also the question of connect. “There is a gap between the BJP and the voters, even though there is a perceptible shift in perception. The BJP has not been able to grasp the language and the sentiment of the region,” said a senior party functionary. Nowhere is this more evident than in Tamil Nadu, where the BJP’s attempts to ride on the coattails of the AIADMK did not yield results. The party managed to win just one seat and 2.97% of the vote share. “There was huge anti-incumbency against the ruling DMK, but the people opted to vote for the new outfit (TVK) rather than the AIADMK, which is an ally of the BJP…they preferred to stay with a party that adheres to the social justice and identity-based politics of the state,” said the functionary cited above. The BJP attempted to portray the DMK as an anti-Hindu party for not permitting the Karthigai Deepam ritual at the Subramaniya Swamy Temple in Thirupparankundram, but the issue found no resonance across the larger Hindu constituency. In Kerala, the BJP’s attempts to woo Christians did not yield the desired results, although the party won three seats, its highest ever, and ended with a respectable stand-alone vote share of 11.43% (the larger NDA alliance received a little over 14% of the votes). “In Kerala too, the Congress was preferred; this shows that the BJP’s message of inclusivity did not register with the Christians, who are the third largest group in the state,” said the functionary. According to the 2011 census, Christians account for about 18.38% of the state, and the BJP has been wooing them, engaging with different castes and sects within the community. “There was an experiment that the BJP carried out in Keralam, we reached out to the non-Catholics…and to the Hindus with the message that the demography of the state has changed, and what the perils will be for both the communities. The results are not what we expected, but there is an incremental growth, which will change for the better,” said a second state leader who asked not to be named. The leader said both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah have emphasised time and again that, for the BJP to grow as a pan-India entity, it will have to dispel the impression that it is a north Indian, Hindi-speaking party. It has already done that in the West, the East, and even the North-east. Only the South remains. Smriti covers an intersection of politics and governance. Having spent over a decade in journalism, she combines old fashioned leg work with modern story telling tools.