With the 2021 Tamil Nadu Assembly election approaching from the horizon, Dravidian politics might soon come face to face with one of its greatest modern-day challenges — Hindutva. With the recent visit of Home Minister and BJP leader Amit Shah to Chennai, it has become imperative to ask how the stalwarts of the Dravidian movement, the AIADMK and DMK, will deal with the challenge of the saffron party.
Before delving into the present scenario, it is important to first grapple with the legacy of Dravidianism. When the DMK seized control of the political landscape in 1967, it may not have imagined that its ascendant philosophical chassis, which was premised on the assertion of a unique Tamil ethnic identity comprising linguistic, scriptural, and broader cultural nuance, would dominate the State for well over half a century.
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Flexible and accommodative
The reasons for the resilience of Dravidian ideology are manifold and include, importantly, its deeply flexible and accommodative impulse. This allowed numerous Backward Classes and Scheduled Castes, comprising largely of small-property owners, to be pulled into the tent of the DMK’s ‘assertive populism’, a demanding, even strident, political movement that pushed back on the erstwhile hegemony of Brahminism, Hindi, the political diktats of a faraway New Delhi, and caste Hinduism. Mass welfare policies gained enormous momentum in parallel, and became entrenched, institutionalised forms of mediating redistributive conflicts at the State level.
The innate flexible quality of Dravidian politics also allowed it to morph over time to tolerate, even encourage, political leadership of multiple vectors within its ambit. Thus, when M.G. Ramachandran broke off from the DMK and started the AIADMK, he was able to score remarkable victories at the hustings, premised upon a rainbow social coalition of Thevars, Dalits, and a smorgasbord of other middle castes.
This nimbleness and capability for political innovation played a crucial role in sustaining the relevance of Dravidian philosophy through the turbulent economic reform years of the 1990s and 2000s. During this period, rapid industrial growth in the State went together with a shadowy system of resource expropriation, and that required bringing in and paying off a range of political players whose backgrounds varied from the ‘core’ leaders of the movement.
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The second biggest challenge
However, if economic reforms towards modernisation comprised the first wave of challenges to Dravidianism, Hindutva, as practised by the Sangh Parivar and the BJP, comprises the second, and potentially greater gauntlet. This challenge comes at a time when, under the presidential-style politics practised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there is a tendency in some pockets to label any ideology that does not defer to Hindutva as anti-national and a threat to majoritarian religious identity.
Today, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi Palaniswami has risen from a relatively less-known status during the time of former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa and proven his capability to govern and bring succour to the people of the State across a broad swathe of policy issues, from flood management to fighting for more Central government funds in the battle against COVID-19.
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This puts the voters at a crossroads, and there is a choice that they must make between two options. The first is Dravidian politics, whose onus it will be to prove that it is attuned to socioeconomic modernity, yet preserves its commitment to mass welfare schemes and good governance and the idea of Tamil exceptionalism. The second is the idiom of national politics, and the greater space that it would afford to neoliberal market economics, Hindutva politics and a social policy essentially formulated in New Delhi.
Next year could be an inflection point that shifts the needle on State autonomy and regional power, or it could be a reaffirmation of faith in the power of Dravidian politics to transform itself and Tamil Nadu to rise to the challenges of the century.
narayan@thehindu.co.in
