It’s quite-often quoted that Gujarat is the laboratory of kind of Hindutva politics that the RSS wants to have it in India.
Since the BJP, under the leadership of Narendra Modi, has come to the centerstage of the national politics, displacing the Congress, the anti-BJP politics is defined oft times as fighting against the “Gujarat model”.
On April 12, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee once again said that she won’t allow Bengal to be Gujarat. In Delhi, if the word secularism is much used and abused, “Gujarat” too is much sullied in the capital’s corridors by power elites since 2002 riots of Gujarat.
India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) may have mastered the art of communication during election campaigns but if you discount its propaganda, you may be able to count the reasons for its actual strength on ground zero during the election battle.
During the assembly election of Bihar in 2015 and in Delhi elections of 2020, many political pundits have been victims of the BJP’s perception-building exercise.
Amit Shah, former BJP president and India’s current Home Minister, has often been criticised for his high-pitched and often noisy campaign but Shah’s scripting of a historic victory in the Uttar Pradesh election of 2017 where the BJP got 312 (out of 384 seats that the party contested) has compelled everyone to take his election-time claims very seriously.
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Among many new elements, two things stand out in the great Tamilian political game.
First, how long the Dravidian politics, unique to the state, would survive as the 21 century marches on?
Second, is Prime Minister Narendra Modi, still considered an outsider in the state, effective enough to change the fundamental terms of the Tamilian politics?
In the ongoing election campaigning for the 234 seats of the assembly, people are missing the towering personalities of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) patriarch M. Karunanidhi, state’s five time chief minister who died in 2018 and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s (AIDMK) strong leader J. Jayalalithaa, six time chief minister who died in December 2016. There are no charismatic giants in the electoral battlefield and that’s not normal for Tamil voters.