Natarajan Pasupathy, the priest of the Pattalamman temple in Payyur Guddapatti village of Krishnagiri district, turned philosophical when asked about the relevance of Hindutva in Tamil Nadu, the Dravidian fortress. “It is like the mythical Saraswati,” he said, referring to the third major holy river in the Rig Veda, apart from Ganga and Yamuna. “You can’t see it right now. These are difficult times. It runs below the surface. Like the Saraswati, Hindutva runs in the blood of the Tamil people,” he said. Pasupathy is from the new generation of lowered caste Hindutva leaders in the state where the movement has been traditionally kept alive by Tamil Brahmins and a handful of Marwari businessmen. He belongs to a non-Brahmin artisanal community called Achari, categorised as OBC, which traditionally specialised in temple construction.
In northern India, certain castes that are into temple construction face untouchability, with temples being purified and consecrated by Brahmins after they are constructed. But in the relatively progressive parts of the peninsula, the Acharis have found acceptance for centuries as priests of smaller temples patronised by non-Brahmins. Pasupathy’s forefathers, for instance, have been priests at the Pattalamman temple for eight generations.
Such family-run temples are largely barred for Dalits who face widespread untouchability in TN where the primary social and political contest in the 21st century has been between Brahmins and non-Brahmin Shudra communities.
Pasupathy is also the district secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s (VHP) Dharmapuri unit.
“In Hindutva, as in Hinduism, there is space for all jatis and varnas, their customs and traditions. It is the Dravidian parties which are the casteist parties, they are the ones dividing people by caste, they are the ones who have turned Thevars, Vanniyars, Gounders into caste blocs,” he said when we met him in early August at his tiny shop near the Dharmapuri bus depot from where he runs a flailing logistics business.
Stocked to the ceiling in the shop were boxes of cheap motorbike helmets, which he planned to sell as a side hustle because the main business wasn't doing too well. The shop also passed for the VHP’s Dharmapuri headquarters. There was room only for two chairs and a table on which Pasupathy had placed a photo of ‘Bharat Mata’ and a white bottle on which he had painted a Hindi film slogan: “Apna Time Aayega” (our time will come).
This is a critical time for the Hindutva movement and its political front, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in TN where it has only four MLAs. Starting with the upcoming general elections in 2024, the next few years will see the truest test of the BJP’s famed organisational capacity and the relevance of its core ideology – Hindu nationalism – in Tamil politics.
The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), which has been its formal and informal ally for many years, finally cut ties with the BJP on September 25. The breakup was quite clearly forced upon the faction-ridden AIADMK after the BJP state president K Annamalai made disparaging remarks about two late stalwarts of the party—J Jayalalithaa and CN Annadurai. In June this year, while commenting on the corruption in Tamil Nadu, Annamalai spoke about the conviction of the state’s former chief ministers, without naming Jayalalithaa. In September he said Annadurai made a comment against the Hindu faith in 1956.
While this was the immediate and most visible trigger, the BJP has been trying to play the alpha in the relationship ever since the death of Jayalalithaa in 2016 threw the AIADMK into a leadership crisis. The party’s cadres have been frustrated with their leaders for capitulating before the BJP since then.
The parting of ways couldn’t have come as a surprise to the mass organisations behind the BJP. TNM spoke to a cross-section of Sangh Parivar leaders in the twin districts of Dharmapuri and Krishnagiri in August-September this year and learned they were already preparing for a future for the BJP without the AIADMK in tow.
We decided to visit this northwestern region of TN, which shares a border with Karnataka after we learnt that the BJP and its affiliates had been growing at the cost of two smaller but nevertheless significant Dravidian parties - the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), which is part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) alliance, and the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK). Both these parties once enjoyed a sizeable following in the old Salem district which comprised Dharmapuri and Krishnagiri along with Namakkal.
“You want to see the Saraswati?” Pasupathy brought up the mythical river after spending a few hours talking about the problems faced by the Sangh under DMK’s rule. “Come back during Vinayaka Chaturthi, visit Hosur, see the splendour of Hindutva during the festival. The ruling party may stifle Hindutva using the police and control major Hindu temples through the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR & CE) Department. But, during Vinayaka Chaturthi, the true spirit of Hindutva takes over the streets like a flood.”
“Chennai, Coimbatore, the Nilgiris, Kanyakumari, Madurai, Trichy, Thanjavur, the Cauvery delta; wherever you go during the festival season, you will see Sangh activists working within the local community. How did Vinayaka Chaturthi become such a big festival in TN, who brought it out in the public?”
“We did. How did all this happen if only Dravidianism worked in TN? Anyway, you must visit Hosur in September to understand what I am saying,” he said as he shared the phone numbers of a wide network of Hindutva activists in the two districts, not one of whom was a Brahmin. “Once upon a time it was mostly Brahmins, things are different now,” he said.
What were we to do until September and where was this mythical river of Hindutva when it was not flooding streets?
One of the Sangh activists we were introduced to, a government school teacher who did not wish to be identified, said, “Visit the tribal areas, see how hard Hindus are working to preserve the faith from Christian missionaries. We are doing a lot of work in education. We are struggling to maintain independence in our educational institutions under severe pressure from the government. You should speak to the BJP leaders. They are planning a big demonstration on August 14 to mark the partition of Bharat.”
On August 14, we found the BJP’s Dharmapuri unit in disarray. The demonstration, during which speakers had planned to talk about the concept of ‘Akhand Bharat’, had to be cancelled at the last moment because of pressure from the police which saw the programme as a security threat ahead of the Independence Day celebrations.
“The DMK is running a police state, there is no democracy,” said the BJP’s Dharmapuri president A Baskar when we spoke to him on the phone to check why the demonstration was cancelled. “Come to the party office,” he said.
The party’s spanking new district headquarters, located at a desolate spot on the Harur highway outside Dharmapuri town, was still smelling of paint and had debris left over from the construction. The party workers who eagerly showed us around the office said that they could afford it because donations had spiked in the district after the IPS officer turned politician, K Annamalai, took over as BJP state president. “The party office in Hosur is bigger and more impressive,” one of them said, “party offices across the state have got a facelift after Annamalai took charge.” The conference hall on the top floor was packed with the party’s entire district leadership. The president, general secretaries, treasurer and convener; heads of special wings for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs), women, lawyers, farmers and trade unions.
They all looked disappointed with how the day had panned out. The district convener K Muniraj spoke in a charged voice and often invoked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah as he tried to motivate the workers. “Let this day not dampen our spirit, we need to make sure that the August 16 programme for the Bharat Mata statue is a success,” he said. Reminding them that P Sudhakar Reddy, the BJP’s national co-incharge for TN, would be the chief guest for the event, he said, “There should be no mistake.”
The meeting ended with the distribution of brass pots among the party leaders in the room. Baskar spoke over the commotion as the leaders rushed forward to collect the pots, “Fill these pots with soil from every part of Dharmapuri. On August 16, we will gather the pots at the Bharat Mata statue at Papparapatti and from there it will be sent to Delhi where soil from across the country will be brought to make a grand Bharat Mata statue. Explain the message properly to the people, they will have many questions, be patient, explain properly.”
As he rushed away to prepare for the August 16 event, Bhaskar stopped to comment on the police clampdown, “The DMK government thinks it can force its Dravidian politics on the people. Things are very different in TN since the DMK was in power last. Our party has grown considerably.”
The August 16 event was planned 30 km away from district headquarters in the historic panchayat town of Papparapatti at a park dedicated to the freedom fighter and Tamil nationalist Subramaniya Siva, the first person to be arrested on sedition charges by the British in the erstwhile Madras presidency.
Inspired by the Arya Samaj, Siva was one of the early Hindu nationalists, who started one of the state’s first Tamil-based Hindutva organisations, the Dharma Paribalana Samaj in 1907, when he was 23-years-old. Among his mentors were Lala Lajpat Rai and Balgangadhar Tilak, who are also credited with making Vinayak Chaturthi a major public festival in India starting with the British Bombay Presidency.
Siva was different from other Tamil revivalists in the Madras Presidency who took a more separatist position on the question of Indian nationalism. He tried to blend the cause of Tamil nationalism with the larger Indian nationalist movement. He was among a handful of Brahmins in the state who advocated for Tamil over Sanskrit in temple rituals. Acknowledged by the DMK and AIADMK as a Tamil nationalist, Siva is now being reclaimed and celebrated as a Hindu nationalist by the Sangh.
Siva wanted to install a statue of Bharat Mata at Papparapatti and laid the foundation stone for it in 1923. However, his health deteriorated drastically over the next couple of years until he died in July 1925, leaving the statue project unfinished. He was cremated at the site which was turned into a public park in his memory.
The Sangh picked up Siva’s unfinished project as a rallying point during the AIADMK’s stint in power between 2001 and 2006. The Papparapatti statue campaign flagged during the DMK’s rule between 2006 and 2011. It peaked again as soon as J Jayalalithaa returned to power in 2011.
“The two consecutive terms for the AIADMK were the most productive time for Hindutva in TN,” recalled Pasupathy. According to him, Jayalalithaa always had a soft corner for Hindutva and the Sangh despite being in and out of formal alliances with the BJP since the time of AB Vajpayee’s Prime Ministership.
In 2012, Jayalalithaa inaugurated the renovated memorial of Subramaniya Siva at the Papparapatti park and, at long last, laid the foundation stone for the Bharat Mata statue. It took the government another six years to announce a budget of Rs 1.5 crore for the construction of the statue at the park.
The golden figurine holding a tricolour was finally completed towards the end of the AIADMK’s rule, long after the death of Jayalalithaa.
The DMK, which regained power in the summer of 2021, immediately thwarted all attempts by the Sangh to lay claim to the statue. A metal shelter was built around the statue and locked to prevent Sangh activists from conducting pujas at the site.
In August 2022, the BJP’s then district vice president KP Ramalingam broke open the lock and tried to offer prayers at the statue as part of the Independence Day celebrations. The police arrested Ramalingam along with four other party leaders and registered cases against 50 cadre-level functionaries. The BJP and its affiliates in the Sangh were keen to make a show of it at the memorial this year and invited a national-level BJP leader to raise the stature of the event.
But, on August 16, we reached Papparapatti to discover that the local BJP leaders had got the messaging for the event completely wrong.
The chief guest, Sudhakar Reddy, said nothing about a Bharat Mata statue. He said that plants and soil unique to districts like Salem, Krishnagiri, Dharmapuri, and Namakkal were being collected for the ‘Amrit Vatika' garden project in Delhi announced by the Prime Minister.
The August 16 event was part of the ‘Amrit Kalash Yatra’ to collect 7,500 pots of soil and saplings from across the country to be used for the garden in Delhi. His speech, which was delivered in Hindi-influenced English, was mostly lost in translation. The BJP leaders we spoke to at the event, including Baskar, continued to believe that the pots of soil would be used for a Bharat Mata statue in Delhi.
How had the Amrit Vatika event been confused for a Bharat Mata event? And why was the largest political organisation in the country, renowned for its communications strategy, struggling to organise simple events and put out a straight message? We couldn't identify anybody in the chaos of the event for answers.
Read: BJP’s fight against DMK in Dharmapuri is centred around a ‘Bharat Mata’ idol
It would be a month before we tracked down the man said to have all the answers. On September 12, we met KG Kaverivarman, the treasurer of the BJP’s Dharmapuri unit, who is said to be the party’s principal strategist in the district. He is also a lawyer, the head of the party's legal cell and runs an organisation called World Hindu Mission in Dharmapuri which he claims has members across the world.
When we met at the World Hindu Mission office, Kaverivarman was dealing with the fallout of another militant demonstration. “Yesterday, the police arrested 133 of our party workers for picketing the HR & CE Department. They were released only after midnight. I got home at dawn,” he said.
The BJP’s district unit had tried picketing the government office on September 11 to protest the statements on Sanatana Dharma made by Udhayanidhi Stalin. But they were arrested before they could execute their plan. “The government is using the police to scare away our party workers,” Kaverivarman said.
So what happened at the August 16 programme and why did the party appear so confused? Kaverivarman dismissed it as a small coordination problem and also said the Bharat Mata issue was the main focus as far as the district unit of the party was concerned.
“This is a fresh new BJP in Dharmapuri and across TN which is different from the party before Modi-Shah, and more recently, Annamalai took over. The entire leadership structure has changed, there are many newcomers from other parties. They’ll take time to imbibe the party culture,” he said.
The momentum has helped the BJP fill up vacancies in its existing units as well as create new wings. It now has 27 sub-committees in the district for various special interest groups such as lawyers, women, students, Dalits, Adivasis, Backward Classes and farmers. Each has its sub-committees down to the panchayat level. “We have around 3,500 office bearers in various units of the party in Dharmapuri,” he said.
Kaverivarman said that at least half of the party leadership and cadre in the old Salem region is from PMK and DMDK. There was a mass exodus from the DMDK after its founder, actor Vijayakanth, lost control of the party owing to poor health.
Baskar, the party’s president, both the general secretaries, as well as Kaverivarman were senior leaders in the DMDK before switching to the BJP in 2017. Baskar even won the Dharmapuri constituency on a DMDK ticket in 2011 and Kaverivarman was the party MLA nominee from Palacode constituency in 2016, although he ended up losing after bagging only 4,915 votes.
All of them belong to the Vanniyar caste, categorised as Most Backward Class (MBC), which dominates politics in the region and is the spine behind all political parties in northwest TN. In a majority of the seats here, Kaverivarman said, not putting up a Vanniyar candidate would translate into an advantage for PMK, a party started by S Ramadoss in 1,989 as a vanguard of the community. “But the PMK is almost finished,” he said, “So is the DMDK.”
The DMDK, which won an impressive 29 seats in 2011, hasn’t won a single seat in the last two rounds of state elections. The PMK, which contested 232 seats in the 2016 elections, in a much-publicised bid to independently capture power in the state, did not win a single seat that year. Its candidates lost their deposit in 212 seats.
In the next elections in 2021, the PMK joined the BJP-led NDA coalition and contested in only 23 seats, ending with less than 4% of the popular vote, with victories in five segments. The BJP, which won four of the 20 seats contested, and secured nearly 3% of the popular vote, claimed it had a better strike rate than the regional party and enjoyed the support of a more diverse social base.
“The thing with the PMK is one caste riot and they’ll bounce right back,” Kaverivarman said.
PMK workers were accused of destroying 1,400 Dalit houses during the riots that ensued in 1989 when the party was launched with the agitation demanding MBC status for Vanniyars.
In November 2012, Vanniyars in the Dharmapuri region went on a rampage and set fire to 268 Dalit houses because Ilavarsan, a Dalit man, eloped and married Divya, a Vanniyar woman. On July 4, 2013, Ilavarasan was murdered and his mutilated body was found on the railway tracks in Dharmapuri.
The PMK was accused of orchestrating the violence and S Ramadoss went on record to allege that Dalit youngsters dressed in jeans, t-shirts and sunglasses, were going around the district on motorbikes wooing caste-Hindu girls into marriage. Like the Hindutva bogey of ‘love jihad’ they refer to such love affairs as ‘naadaga kaadhal’ (drama love). The PMK’s parent organisation, the Vanniyar Sangam, went as far as to run a public campaign against inter-caste marriages.
Although the AIADMK had been in an alliance with the PMK in the past, during a particularly violent phase in 2013, Jayalalithaa likened the Vanniyar party to a “terrorist organisation” and threatened to ban it.
Can Hindu become Hindutva?
If caste polarisation is its formula, as Kaverivarman claimed, why has the PMK not managed to revive its electoral fortunes in the region even after the 2013 tumult? Importantly, could the pride and prejudices of caste Hindus in the region evolve into Hindutva militancy?
“It’s not that easy. We are not worried about the PMK winning elections, it is the grip of their ideology that is the problem. Their electoral power is weak but their ideology is influential. And it is dividing Hindus,” said Kaverivarman, “How will they think about Bharat Mata and Hindutva when they are obsessed with their caste pride?”
He said that the PMK’s actual power comes from the Vanniyar Sangam, the apex federation of Vanniyar organisations, which is also the parent body of the party. The Sangam, like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is not restricted to patronising just one party and plays a deeper role in shaping policy in the state by working with parties across the ideological spectrum.
“The PMK leaders claim atheism and Dravidianism on one side and practice casteism on the other. They praise Periyar but also control thousands of temples that are exclusive to certain castes using the power of Vanniyar landlordism,” Kaverivarman said. Although he opposed the caste politics of the PMK, he said he could empathise with the father of the Vanniyar girl who died by suicide when she married a Dalit boy in 2013.
The claims about the exodus from the PMK, led us to its senior party leader and former Lok Sabha MP Dr R Senthil, a renowned urologist. During our meeting at the Thangam hospital in Dharmapuri, which he owned, Senthil displayed none of the aggression or the Dalit animosity associated with his party. The chamber where he was attending to patients was decorated with several sculptures of the Buddha and even had a portrait of BR Ambedkar.
“The BJP and RSS in TN are a mirage, they can never take root in this Dravidian land,” he said and described those who had deserted the PMK as “opportunists who had left a progressive party founded on the principles of Marx, Periyar and Ambedkar.” He claimed that his party was not anti-Dalit as alleged and described the BJP as a casteist and Brahminical party.
The PMK’s complicated history has not stopped progressive groups in TN from including its leaders in anti-Hindutva formations such as the Samuga Nallinakka Medai (Social harmony forum). It is a state-wide coalition of avowedly secular parties such as the Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)), DMK, the Periyarist outfit Dravida Kazhagam and Thol Thirumavalavan’s Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK) which represents Dalits from the Paraiyar caste in TN. In Dharmapuri, the Medai recently organised a book fair in which Dr Senthil was one of the chief guests.
Interestingly, the urologist came in for national criticism after he claimed in a July 2013 interview with Priyamvatha P of Headlines Today that Ilavarasan had died by suicide, not murder. Describing the family's claims that he had been murdered as “wild imagination,” Dr Senthil blamed Bollywood and Western culture for the couple’s decision to elope.
The doctor betrayed none of this sentiment when he spoke to TNM. “Dravidian society was ruled by Shudra Kings and Sanatana Hindu society was ruled by Brahmins. The BJP and Sangh Parivar want to bring back Sanatana,” he said.
He blamed Jayalalithaa for the growth of Hindutva in TN and said that it was during her rule that the RSS agenda gained acceptance. “She was a Brahmin and she worked towards weakening the non-Brahmin politics of the state. She supported Hindutva forces on issues such as cow slaughter, religious conversions and the Rama Sethu campaign. She promoted Brahmin priests in temples and government functions,” Dr Senthil alleged.
It is not easy to understand the mind of a Tamil Hindu, said Kaverivarman. He claimed that the ‘Dravidian fortress’ also has the highest density of Hindu temples in India. Referring to the Srirangam temple in Trichy, which is the largest and oldest temple in India, he said there’s a statue of Periyar EV Ramasamy, who desecrated Hindu idols and said there is no God, installed by the government right outside the shrine.
“Tamils are the type who will bow at the Periyar statue outside the temple and then bow to lord Ranganathaswamy inside the temple,” he said, adding, “You know what is funny about Tamil nationalism and the non-Brahmin movement? Periyar was from Karnataka, Karunanidhi was from Andhra, MGR was from Kerala and Jayalalithaa was a Brahmin from Karnataka.”
Whether Hindutva is growing or not, the BJP is growing and becoming more relevant in the state, Kaverivaman claimed. “You see the kind of hero worship Annamalai gets from young people? It has little to do with Hindutva and more to do with the fact that Annamalai was a supercop who gave up his prestigious job for life in politics and joined a party which is not yet big in TN. He is challenging 50 years of Dravidian rule on issues such as administration, governance, economic policy and corruption,” he said.
Our research into the history of the BJP and Sangh Parivar’s mobilisation in the region over the last decade showed that temples, educational institutions and public spaces have been their main theatres of action.
During the decade when the AIADMK was in power, Hindutva organisations enthusiastically worked toward conducting special pujas, introduced new festive traditions for women and organised discourses on Hindu theology in temples.
Many private schools and colleges in TN are run by Hindutva sympathisers. Dharmapuri-based industrialist DNC Manivannan, for instance, runs a string of schools and colleges in the region which have often hosted ideology camps for RSS workers and students. CBSE syllabus schools in the state, where Hindi and Sanskrit receive prominence, are a stronghold of the Sangh. In fact, Dharmapuri-based KR Nandakumar, the secretary of the Tamil Nadu Nursery Primary Matriculation Higher Secondary & CBSE Schools Association, is also the Secretary of the education cell of the state BJP.
The AIADMK period also saw militant, vigilante-style public interventions by Sangh activists in the twin districts over core Hindutva issues.
“During the AIADMK time, we could mobilise freely. We took direct action on issues such as cow protection, love jihad and Christian conversions. We could organise camps on our ideology in schools run by the Sangh. The temples were free from the control of the HR & CE Department. There was a visible Hindutva awakening in those years. The police and Revenue Department did not target us,” Kaverivarman said, “Things are very different now, very hostile. The police have been booking criminal cases against our activists. There are severe restrictions inside temples controlled by the HR & CE Department. We are not able to conduct any religious events in the temples, We cannot knowingly push our workers towards danger.”
According to him, the crackdown on the Sangh’s vigilante activities since the MK Stalin government came to power has forced activists to work below the radar. Strangely, he said, there has been a small shift in the police reaction to the BJP since Annamalai took over. “They are under pressure from the government to book cases against us. But still, policemen have some respect for the party after Annamalai IPS became president,” he claimed.
A state police intelligence officer engaged in surveillance of the more militant arms of the Sangh in Dharmapuri said that there is now a list with the Department of each individual who has been involved in cow vigilantism and religious violence in the district in the last 15 years. “I can safely say that there has been no major incident of religious violence in Dharmapuri in the last year,” he said.
The officer said that the strategy of the police is to work behind the scenes to prevent an incident before it happens. “We have thwarted several attempts to create violence without anybody in the public even getting a whiff,” he said, adding that the fear of arrests and prosecution has curtailed Sangh activists. He also said that a majority of the activists in militant Hindutva groups were from the Vanniyar community.
The officer said that there was a string of attacks against minorities, particularly Christian evangelists, in the lead-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha and 2021 Assembly elections. He said that the police were not able to do much at the time because of political pressure.
The Pennagaram taluk of Dharmapuri, where many attacks by Vanniyar groups have occurred on Dalit-Vanniyar couples, is an area where the Sangh is very active, the officer said, recalling an attack on a pastor in the Pavalandur village in 2019.
A 21-year-old BJP activist from the area, belonging to the Vanniyar community, had allegedly barged into the residential quarter of a local church and assaulted the pastor when he was bathing. The pastor, who was dragged out of the bathroom and beaten while being accused of offering inducements to convert people, walked in the same state to the police station to register a complaint. “While he was protected from further harassment, the Department was under pressure to go easy on the BJP leader, and no case was filed,” the intelligence officer said, “But the same person and his associates are now silent, as we are keeping a watch on them.”
He said that a bulk of the attacks happened in 2019 and recalled an attack on a pastor at a church in Vennampatti area of Dharmapuri. “The women’s wing of the BJP had organised a protest outside the church accusing the pastor of forcible conversions. The police intervened when the protest turned violent and stones were flung at the pastor. The next day party activists held a big rally outside a church during which they replaced the crucifix with the saffron flag,” he said, “We could not do much then but this cannot happen now.”
In 2019, TN saw the second-highest number of Hindutva attacks against Christians after Uttar Pradesh. A majority of these attacks occurred in the Kongu region made up of Coimbatore, Erode, Dharmapuri, Krishnagiri, Salem, Namakkal, Karur and Tirupur. Incidents were also reported from parts of Dindigul and Madurai district. These districts are also traditional hotbeds of violence against Dalits.
The police officer said that Vanniyars have traditionally been insecure about Dalits converting to Christianity as it weakens their dominance over the community that they still consider as untouchable. “The BJP is exploiting this insecurity,” he said.
Asked about the claim that many in the Police Department have a soft corner for Annamalai, the intelligence officer said, “I don’t think the treatment of the BJP has changed because of Annamalai. But there is respect in the force for the things he did as an IPS officer. Apart from that, we just carry out orders of whichever government is in power.”
Senior officials of the Education Department in Dharmapuri district confirmed Kaverivarman’s claim that there has been a clampdown on Sangh activities in schools. “We are under strict instructions to prevent any political activity in educational institutions whether they are private or government-run,” said a source at the office of the Dharmapuri Chief Education Officer. The source revealed that in June 2022, they stopped an RSS camp at the Radha Matriculation School in Palacode, which is run by Sangh sympathisers, after a protest against the event by the CPI(M).
The school management was also issued a notice by the Education Department for hosting the event which was attended by DNC Manivannan. The official said that many educational institutions, particularly those run by Manivannan, were used for RSS programs during the previous regime. The industrialist, who runs many commercial establishments in Dharmapuri, including malls, multiplexes and hotels, refused our request for an interview.
When we met officials of the HR & CE Department on September 1, they were busy with the work of appointing temple administration committees across the district, thanks to a raft of petitions against them filed by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy.
In August 2022, the Supreme Court issued a notice to the TN government after Swamy challenged the provisions of the TN Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act, 1959, which gives control to the state government over appointments of archakas (priests), trustees and administrators in Hindu temples. In December of that same year, the Supreme Court issued a fresh notice to the state government based on another petition by Swamy alleging that the DMK regime had taken control of the management of 38,000 temples by appointing executive officers or government bureaucrats in place of trustees.
HR & CE officials said that these petitions have pushed the government to start a massive statewide drive to appoint temple trustees and administration committees. There are 1,150 temples under government control in Dharmapuri, HR & CE sources told us, and a majority of them are being administered by government officials. “The district-level committee, which is supposed to select the trustees and form the temple committees, was constituted six months ago. Since then only 100 out of the 1,150 temples have been covered. It will take till the end of the year to finish all the appointments,” one official said.
The official revealed that, although the HRCE Act stipulates that the government should appoint temple committees, this has never been done in the 20 years that she’s been in service. “Temples would mostly be administered by a combination of bureaucrats and ruling party affiliates,” she said, adding, “Even now that the committees are being appointed, the members are all from the ruling party.”
Kaverivarman said that Swamy’s petition has shaken up the DMK government and the Supreme Court notices to the HRCE have given the Hindutva movement a major talking point in the state. “But ultimately we are losing out because all the committees are being stuffed with DMK loyalists. Earlier, in areas where our party and movement were strong, we could have a say in temple matters. Now, we will be pushed out of temple affairs even in places where we have the people’s support,” he said.
Speaking of caste discrimination in Hindu temples, he said he wholeheartedly supports non-Brahmins, Dalits and women becoming priests. “But I don't understand this big show that the DMK government is doing by training priests from these communities and appointing them in government-run temples. This disrupts the customs and traditions that have been practised in these temples for centuries. Also, there have been Dalit, women and non-Brahmins as priests in Sanatana Hinduism,” he said, indifferent to the contradiction between the two positions.
With a few weeks still to go for the Vinayaka Chaturthi festivities in Hosur, in mid-September we decided to visit the hills of Sitling and Sitteri, around 70 km south of Dharmapuri town, where the population is predominantly from the Malayali Scheduled Tribe (not to be confused with speakers of Malayalam). Sangh activists had told us about their contests with Christian missionaries in the hills which come under the Harur taluk of Dharmapuri.
The mention of Sitteri hills among the human rights activists of TN immediately brings up the Vachathi case. Vachathi is a string of Malayali hamlets where a combined force of police, forest and revenue department officers unleashed a wave of terror on June 20, 1992, under the pretext of combating sandalwood smuggling.
The government officers raped 18 women, many of them minors, looted and pillaged valuables and livestock. A couple of weeks after our visit, the Madras High Court upheld the Dharmapuri sessions court verdict in the case which convicted all the 269 officers who had been accused of grave human rights violations by the Malayali tribespeople.
We made several failed attempts to meet the BJP’s Harur taluk secretary, Dinakaran, who party sources in Dharmapuri described as an active leader in the tribal region. During the AIADMK regime, Dinakaran had helped in the construction of a Ramar (Rama) temple at his hamlet in the hills. The then BJP state president Pon Radhakrishnan had inaugurated the temple.
While Dinakaran wasn't enthusiastic about being interviewed, we discovered that KN Mallaiah, a senior CPI(M) leader, was mobilising Malayalis in the area for a national-level conference of the party’s Tamil Nadu Tribal Association (TNTA). Mallaiah, TNTA’s district secretary, said the Sangh has intensified its Hindutva campaign in the Sitteri and Sitling forest areas.
Mallaiah said that the Malayali tribespeople have never worshipped Vedic deities such as Rama, Anjaneya or Vinayaka. He explained that ‘Malai’ means hill in Tamil and ‘Aal’ means person in Tamil, hence the name Malayali. “Many of the tribal deities are not in human form except a few like Kariraman and Vanishwaran,” Mallaiah said, “Now, the Sangh is introducing these deities. They twist the narrative to say Kariraman is Rama and Vanishwaran is Eshwaran or Shiva,” he said.
This Hinduisation is also made easier by the fact that the Malayali tribal people are culturally different from other communities in the ST list. They often refer to themselves as Malayali Gounders and trace their lineage to the land-owning and politically influential Gounder community which is categorised as an OBC in TN. A section of OBC Gounders call themselves Malayali Gounders and claim ST status and this has created anxiety among other tribal groups in the state.
The strict endogamy between various castes is a tad relaxed between caste-Hindu Gounders and the tribalistic Malayali Gounders. While marriages between the two communities aren’t common, they are not a scandal either. “The Malayali Gounders are more inclined towards Hinduism. The Sangh is using this to spread Sanatana Dharma here by setting up temples. Ten new temples have come up in the hills in the last five-six years,” he said.
When we investigated Mallaiah’s claims, we found only one of the Rama temples in the hills, located near a ‘tanda’ or hamlet belonging to the Lambadi (Lambani, Banjara in other states) community, had been established with direct support from the Sangh. The hamlet, called AK Tanda, is one of the two Lambadi settlements in the hills and is home to the BJP leader, Dinakaran.
One particular Rama temple inside Sitteri Reserve Forest – a scenic complex shrouded with trees and flowering bushes, set against the backdrop of the hills – stands out not just for its aesthetics but also the backstory.
The Malayali residents of a nearby hamlet told TNM that the temple, which is on the Harur-Sitteri road, was built by a famous industrialist who owns an iconic brand in the Indian automobile sector which exported a million of its vehicles to 80 countries in the last financial year.
“He landed in a helicopter for the inauguration,” one resident said and pointed East, “The helipad created for the landing is not far from here.” We decided to withhold the industrialist’s name as he couldn't be reached for comment.
A few kilometres along the forest road, we found a temple of Goddess Kali as well as the Rama temple that had been built in Dinakaran's tanda. Both were new, although we could not find out who was behind the Kali temple, only that it was controlled by Vanniyar settlers in the region.
At Sitling, we came upon a freshly cleared site in the forest where a massive Anjaneya or Hanuman statue had been inaugurated recently as part of a larger temple complex project. We found the temple priests were a Vanniyar couple, S Jayashankaran and J Vanitha, who had settled in the tribal area long ago.
“Fifteen years ago, we started imparting shastra to the villagers. We were able to solve people’s problems with prayer. Soon, people from Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai started visiting us. Now, with their help and our savings, we are building this temple,” Jayashankaran said. “We are now forming a trust for the management of the temple and registration of the land,” said Vanitha. They both denied links with the Sangh or the BJP and said that their patrons were simply devout Hindus.
Mallaiah claimed that the industrialist who built the Rama temple in Sitteri is a known Hindutva sympathiser. “All these people from outside who are investing money in these remote forest temples, who are they and what are their political affiliations? I have been working in these forests for 20 years. Why are these investments happening only now, in the times of Hindutva? We may never know the answers,” he said.
According to him, the demographics of the hills have changed in the last century which has seen many non-tribal communities, including Vanniyars, settling here. “Many forest tracts have been illegally encroached by them. Only designated tribal groups are allowed to own revenue land here but other communities have managed to make inroads,” he said, adding the Lambadi were granted lands in the forest clearings by the state government.
The lambadi – a traditionally nomadic community that has been linked to the persecuted Roma gypsy communities of Europe – were once persecuted as criminal tribes by the British. They are now increasingly aligned with the Sangh in different parts of the country. The community, whose language has strong influences of Hindi and a mix of several South Asian languages, is categorised as Scheduled Caste in Karnataka, ST in parts of Andhra and Telangana, and Backward Class in TN. Mallaiah claimed that they were the main supporters of the BJP in the hills.
A few days after we visited the area, a group of evangelists conducting a gospel training camp in AK Tanda was picketed by a group of BJP activists led by Dinakaran. When the police arrived, the evangelists accused Dinakaran of intimidation and he in turn tried to persuade the police to register a criminal case, accusing them of forcible conversion. Interestingly, Dinakaran’s wife was born a Christian and converted to Hinduism, local BJP sources told TNM. Kaverivarman, who tried to intervene as soon as he learnt of the incident, said, “The police refused to register a case.”
The first public Vinayaka Chaturthi pandal in TN was set up in the Mambalam area of Chennai in 1983 by a small group of activists from the Munnani, BJP and RSS according to the anthropologist CJ Fuller. The idea caught on like a wildfire over the next few years and by the end of that decade pandals were popping up across the state in both urban and rural areas.
The year 1990 saw major riots near the Ice House mosque in Triplicane in Chennai when the Vinayaka procession was passing through the area. Since then, there have been several occasions when violence has erupted outside mosques and churches across the state during Vinayaka processions. The annual festivities became an occasion for Hindutva outfits to demonstrate the power of their ideology in a state where they are dwarfed by the Dravidian parties.
To get a sense of what to expect during Vinayaka Chaturthi in Hosur, we visited the city on September 14 to meet top leaders of the Bajrang Dal and VHP. They described Krishnagiri district, headquartered in Hosur, as second only to Mumbai in the celebrations, with no parallel in state.
“When I came to Hosur as a young man, there was no culture of public Vinayaka Chathurthi celebrations. When our movement peaked a few years ago, there were 1,000 major pandals in Hosur,” said Vishnu Kumar, the TN Joint secretary of the VHP, who prefers to be known as Vishnuji. He is the senior most Hindutva leader in Krishnagiri and controls daily affairs in four districts in the region including Krishnagiri and Dharmapuri.
Vishnuji is originally from Kanyakumari, TN’s Hindutva hotbed, and belongs to the powerful Pillai caste, many of whose members make the chauvinistic claim that they were Brahmins who became Kshatriya by taking up weapons and turning into warriors. They are a meat-eating non-Brahmin community which has traditionally served as barons and bureaucrats in the mediaeval dynasties in parts of what is today Kerala and TN.
“I came to Hosur 42 years ago because of the Mandaikadu riots. I had to leave Kanyakumari as my life was in danger,” said Vishnuji, who has an old scar running along the length of his right forearm. The 1982 riots between Hindus and Christians in Kanyakumari’s Mandaikadu marked the beginning of the Sangh and BJP’s political journey in Tamil Nadu.
Was the scar from the Mandaikadu clashes? “No, not exactly Mandaikadu,” Vishnuji almost blushed, “Let’s just say I was very rough and tough as a young man.” When he reached Hosur, Vishnuji’s first move was to join the district unit of the Hindu Munnani and help set up the first major public pandal in the Ramar Kovil street in Hosur.
Wasn’t Hosur once a stronghold of the communist parties, how did this shift happen? Vishnuji said, “Communism can be useful for some industrial disputes but it cannot be a way of life. There are communists here even now, the MLA of Thalli constituency is from the CPI. He is my friend. He often comes to our religious programs as he is also a Hindu.”
T Ramachandran, the CPI’s Thalli MLA, a rich businessman with interests in real estate, stone quarrying and manpower, was arrested in 2012 after he and his father-in-law Laghumaiah allegedly instigated mass violence during a village temple fair. At the time of his arrest, he was also facing charges of murder, illegal mining and extortion. The party’s decision to grant him a ticket in 2021 was widely criticised by Left groups in the state.
Since the first pandal was set up in Ramar Kovil street in 1983, the same year it was started in Chennai, Vishnuji said, the number of Sangh organisations in the region has grown. This is reflected in the number of pandals in Hosur and the larger Krishnagiri district. Today, Hosur has units of every major national-level Hindutva organisation, Vishnuji said, “The main organisations are Hindu Munnani, VHP, the TN VHP, Bajrang Dal, Sri Rama Sena, Shiv Sena, Hindu Mahasabha. These seven organisations are directly responsible for 250-300 pandals in Hosur,” he claimed.
The Hindu Munnani is now the nodal organisation in TN for Vinayaka celebrations and all other organisations coordinate with them for the larger plan each year. “I and the VHP now are working to establish Krishna Janamasthami in the same way across TN,” he said.
Vishnuji said that from the peak of a thousand Vinayaka pandals in 2021, it came down to 800 last year. “This year we have only 600 pandals,” he said and accused the DMK government for clamping down on Hindutva organisations by imposing what he called “severe restrictions” on the celebrations. He asked us to meet Kiran Kumar, the state Organising Secretary of the Bajrang Dal, for more details.
“The government is trying to control the Hindu religion through the HR & CE Department. So we work in the streets, organise public pujas and mobilise ordinary Hindus. That’s why they are trying to restrict Vinayaka Chaturthi,” Kumar said. He also claimed that the police under the DMK government have been filing cases against his men for trying to stop cow slaughter, conversions and inter-faith marriages. “So now we are focussing only on religious aspects. Love Jihad is going on without check,” he said.
It takes less than an hour on good days to get to Hosur from Koramangala in Bengaluru. It took much longer on September 19, the day a majority of Ganesha pandals were opened to the public. At both ends of the interstate border, every neighbourhood with a Hindu majority boasted at least one pandal at a public spot. While Bengaluru's pandals were mostly religious and community affairs, Hosur’s pandals displayed a pronounced political Hindutva fervour.
As we entered the city, we were greeted by a row of saffron flags, bearing the image of Maratha icon Chhatrapati Shivaji. They ran along the highway for a few kilometres before ending at the pandal of the Hosur unit of the Maharashtra-based, Uddhav Thackeray-led faction of the Shiv Sena.
Within earshot from the central bus depot, the Shiv Sena pandal was spread over half an acre and hard to miss for anybody passing on the highway. For a radius of about a kilometre from the site, there were massive billboards with photos of the Sena’s district president, Murali Mohan, who prefers to be known as ‘MMji’.
MMji told us that apart from the official pandal of the party, there were at least 30 others in which his men had collaborated with the local community. “Seven years ago, my four brothers and I started this pandal,” he said while revealing that he comes from a mixed Telugu-Tamil family and one of his parents is from the Gounder caste, notified as OBC.
“There are restrictions on the size of the statues, the lighting, sound, and electricity supply. I have to get clearances from the police, fire, revenue, highways authority; about a dozen departments in all. I just did the basics and did not bother to follow things like size and sound restrictions. Let them arrest me, let them enter this place,” he challenged.
MMji has his differences with the other Hindutva organisations, starting with the fact that he heads a party that is in an alliance with the Congress and Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) in Maharashtra. Unlike the other leaders we spoke to so far, he had no affection for Jayalalithaa and described her as an “anti-Hindu” Dravidian leader. “She once brought a rule that all Vinayaka statues should be immersed on the same day. The immersions had to start at 7 am and go on till 10 pm. There were still 400 idols to be immersed at midnight. So the police forcibly immersed the idols without proper ceremony,” he alleged.
Asked how he contends with the Shiv Sena’s alliances in Maharashtra, he said, “When it comes to Hindutva MMji has never compromised, never will. The Congress and VBA are anti-Hindu.” Sources in his party later told us that there are discussions to dissolve the Shiv Sena in TN and merge it with the BJP. “Annamalai is a good leader but the BJP in TN has made many mistakes so far. Some leaders need to go,” MMji said, “But everybody in Hosur respects MMji, you can go ask the leaders of the Sangh.”
He summoned one of his men, M Vijay aka Viji, and told him to show us around the main pandals in Hosur. “My trusted man,” MMji said to us and told Viji, “Introduce them to all our friends.”
When we spotted Viji’s auto rickshaw, we were surprised to find that it had no Hindutva iconography. Unlike many other rickshaws, which were decked with religious festoons, the windscreen of Viji's vehicle was bare except for a photo of Ambedkar.
Viji was a bit of a maverick driver and he zipped through the festival jam, missing vehicles and people by inches. We visited the pandals set up by VHP’s Vishnuji and Bajrang Dal’s Kiran Kumar, the Tamil Nadu VHP and the Sri Rama Sene. The crowds that thronged these pandals were also a testament to the cosmopolitan nature of Hosur which attracts workers from across the country. From their jewellery, amulets and traditional outfits, we could identify groups of devotees hailing from Nepal, Bengal, Rajasthan, Odisha, Bihar as well as Manipur.
Keeping with the theme of all the interviews till then, these Sangh leaders too complained about two broad things: the DMK’s clampdown on their activities and the struggle to attract ordinary Tamils who support the Dravidian ideology. They all claimed Hindutva is growing, that the Dravidian fortress was under siege. Yet, by their own admission, they were yet to get a firm grip on the walls, let alone breach the fortress.
All the leaders we spoke to had a high opinion of MMji even though he was not affiliated to any Sangh organisation. They recalled with admiration a recent brawl at Hosur’s main temple between MMji and followers of Seeman, the Chief Coordinator of the Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK), who has been experimenting with an ideological line that combines Hindutva and Tamil nationalism.
On June 27, during a major puja at the ancient Chandra Choodeshwarar hill-temple, NTK activists barged into the sanctum and tried to replace the Brahmin priest who conducts prayers in Sanskrit with a Brahmin priest who conducts prayers in Tamil. The fight between MMji’s and Seeman’s groups brings to the surface, a simmering, century-old internal Hindutva conflict between proponents of Sanskrit and Tamil.
The local Sangh leaders who told us about this incident said that their sympathies were with MMji and they believed in the divinity of Sanskrit. But they couldn't take an open stand because one of the main strategies of the Sangh in the State is to create a new brand of Tamil Hindutva.
“I kicked the hired **** sent by Seeman out of the temple. Nobody can tamper with our ancient temples in Hosur till MMji is alive,” MMji said when we called him to verify the claims.
The last pandal Viji took us to is perhaps the most visually striking pandal in Hosur every year. A floating pandal in the middle of a temple pond, downhill from the imposing Chandra Choodeswarar temple which overlooks the city. Everybody we spoke to until then recommended a visit and said that it was the best pandal organised by the Sangh Parivar. “All the organisations are part of it,” Viji said.
However, when we reached, the volunteers asked us to speak to the main organiser who turned out to be an AIADMK leader named M Raji, who was also the Hosur party secretary. What he said was no different from the other Hindutva leaders we spoke to over the previous two months. He complained that the police department came only two weeks earlier to impose the size restrictions on the statues, even though they knew that work on the statues starts months before the festival.
“They wouldn't dare come here because I am from the AIADMK. But they harass parties that are working for Hindu welfare like the Munnani and VHP,” he said, while denying that the pandal was set up by the Sangh, “Hindus from all parties are in the organising committee, including DMK. After all, even the Chief Minister’s wife is a practising Hindu.”
Throughout the scary rickshaw ride, we held on to the urge to ask Viji about the Ambedkar photo on his windscreen. When we finally brought it up, Viji revealed he was from the Paraiyar Scheduled Caste and said, “Ambedkar gave us equality, he gave us education. When I was little, I used to go with my father to work in the fields. When we were thirsty, they would pour water into our cupped hands from above. That cannot happen now because of Ambedkar.”
About his association with Hindutva, he said that his first loyalty was to MMji. He told us, MMji was like his elder brother, and he could lay down his life for him. He said that he got into “some trouble with some dangerous people” 15 years ago and MMji had helped him relocate to Bengaluru and find a job.
We asked him about the murder of Ilavarasan and the resistance to inter-caste marriages involving Dalits. He said, “It is not about whether our boys can marry Gounder or Vanniyar girls; Why should they, aren't there enough good girls in our community?” Asked about Ambedkar’s call to convert out of Hinduism, he said, “I don’t think he said that, did he?”
(Inputs from Akchayaa Rajkumar, Nithya Pandian and Shabbir Ahmed)