How far has the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) grown in Tamil Nadu since the days it was nothing more than an extended arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)?

Notwithstanding the noise the current crop of BJP leaders make, the play they get in electronic media and elsewhere, and some invigorating performance in the local body polls not long ago, this writer would like to argue that the party will remain a non-starter for ages to come in this Dravidian land.

It was Rama Gopalan, the founder of the Hindu Munnani (Hindu Front), who had unceasingly sought to whip up communal feelings in the state. It was he who started the practice of installing Ganesha idols on street corners during the Chathurthi festival and taking them out for immersion 10 days later or so, as is popular in Maharashtra.

As Rama Gopalan became emboldened, riots also erupted during those processions – in Chennai in 1990, when Karunanidhi was in power; following a clash, police opened fire killing at least three Muslims. Some Muslim establishments were looted too. No such riots occurred on a similar scale later, though there is always tension and minor clashes here and there.

The point but is, halting the procession does not provoke much of a reaction. During Covid times, even the then All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) government had to ban the processions, reluctantly perhaps. And this year when Chief Minister Stalin categorically announced no processions, still the state remained quiet. On both occasions, Hindu zealots thought it prudent not to take on the government.

And not just that, there have been murders of Hindu Munnani leaders over the years, all, of course, the handiwork of Islamic fundamentalists. Rama Gopalan himself was viciously set upon and he barely survived. Still you don’t see much of a Hindu reaction.

Even the Coimbatore blasts of 1998 could not help the BJP reap any political harvest. Well, it did win three seats in the Lok Sabha polls then, but that was solely because it was part of the AIADMK alliance, and the people were upset by and large with the United Front government of the time because of the severe economic downturn.

Noted Parivar theoretician Aravindan Neelakandan, in his tribute to Rama Gopalan in 2020, credits the late leader with creating “the concept of Hindu vote bank. His formula was simple — between a Hindu and non-Hindu candidate, always vote for a Hindu candidate. Between two Hindu candidates, always vote for that candidate who is more open about his or her Hindu identity. Based on this simple yet effective message, he organised huge campaigns in the 1980s and by the 1990s, a Hindu vote bank was created.”

But pray, where is such a bank? In last year’s urban local body polls, fighting on its own, the BJP did win a few seats in Kanyakumari, Coimbatore, and Chennai, creating some excitement within and outside the party.

But look at what this TNIE report said: “BJP which contested alone in the Tamil Nadu Urban Local Body polls, won 22 (1.6%) of the 1,374 Corporation wards, while bagging just 56 (1.5%) of the 2,843 wards in the Municipalities. At Town Panchayat level the saffron party clinched 230 (3%) of the 7,621 seats. In total BJP won 308 (2.4%) of the 12,838 seats that went for polls. It must be noted that over 185 of those 300+ seats won by BJP came from Kanyakumari district where the party has a presence.”

In the rural local body polls held in 2020, when the AIADMK was still in power, the BJP failed to make any mark at all, even though it had contested as an ally of the ruling party.

The late AIADMK supremo Jayalalithaa shocked everyone by calling for a Ram mandir in Ayodhya in the name of respecting Hindu sentiments, while addressing a meeting of the National Integration Council. She encouraged Hindutva outfits in various ways and went on to strike an alliance with the BJP in 1998, but the tie-up unravelled soon, and she kept teasing a desperate saffron party, now accommodating them, now rejecting them and so on.

Even in 2014, she would not have any alliance with the BJP, hoping perhaps that if she won a good number of seats and no front won a majority, she could become a kingmaker. In the event, she did win big, as many as 37 seats, but Modi had walked away with a majority for the NDA and so she didn’t matter much.

Earlier she had hosted Modi at her residence and made a point of attending his swearing-in as Chief Minister twice, after the 2002 mini-pogrom.

In such a backdrop, more than Rama Gopalan’s relentless efforts and the response of the Islamic fundamentalist outfits, Jayalalithaa alone should have succeeded in transforming the psyche of the Tamil Nadu electorate towards some kind of Hindutva orientation. But that doesn’t seem to have happened at all.

A caveat here. Though she did flirt with the Parivar in various ways, she also took pains to stress that she was not anti-minorities, not wanting to lose their votes where it would matter. Thus her regime kept issuing mixed signals, leaving the BJP and its cohorts disappointed. So then if the TN psyche did not exactly undergo any dramatic transformation, perhaps Jayalalithaa herself had not intended to effect such a change.

Barring the overt shows of piety, one doesn’t see any hostility to Muslims among the AIADMK cadres, a sentiment animating the BJP anywhere. And the new party chief Edappadi Palaniswami (EPS), for all his grovelling, keeps a respectable distance whenever the BJP position is seen to be against Tamil interests.

The latest outburst of former minister Jayakumar, declaring no alliance with the BJP, erupted only on a nod from EPS, sources insist. Still the two parties are expected to patch up before long, and TN BJP president K Annamalai could be expected to be directed to pipe down. All the same, one doesn’t see any dramatic swing in the alliance’s fortunes, leave alone the BJP’s.

Let us take Kanyakumari district down south, which is seen as the cradle of Hindu communalism in the state, thanks to a variety of factors, including an aggressive Christian leadership and resistance from the Hindu Nadars, an OBC that has become powerful in parts of the state.

While the BJP could find its way into the Assembly or Lok Sabha only when it rode on the shoulders of a major ally, an independent with pronounced BJP inclinations got elected to the state Assembly from the district way back in 1984. Still the party itself didn’t grow much.

Pon Radhakrishnan, a Hindu Nadar, did emerge as a noted BJP leader of the region. In 1999 when the party was an ally of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), he was elected to the Lok Sabha, and again in 2014 when the BJP, cheated of an alliance with the AIADMK, still managed to cobble together a coalition with smaller parties like the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK).

Of course, the other constituents might have had little to contribute to his victory then, and the BJP could treat it as its very own. But the two-term minister, first under Vajpayee and then under Modi, Radhakrishnan has not exactly carved out any formidable base, despite his close association with Rama Gopalan who also hailed from the same district. Barring the two victories mentioned above, he doesn’t have anything to show for himself.

Annamalai, the president of the state unit now, is a Gounder, a powerful OBC in the western belt. For reasons that have nothing to do with him, the Gounders are drifting towards the BJP. It is generally felt that Muslim fundamentalism, Dalit assertion are some contributory factors.

So then some sections of Thevars, Nadars, and now Gounders, not to mention the Brahmins, could be considered the bulwark of the BJP. (Thevars are a militant OBC, concentrated in the south, who have been extending support to the Hindutva ideology from the RSS days.)

Even when taken together, this bloc is unlikely to become a match-winner in the near future, never mind the Modi appeal to the middle classes in general. For Periyar, in his crusade against Brahmins, had succeeded in convincing the large non-Brahmin masses that Hinduism was no more than a cloak for Brahmin supremacy.

Naturally the non-Brahmins, empowered as a result of Periyar’s Dravidian movement, have great affection for him, and their suspicion of Brahmins cannot be said to have vanished.

Throw into this cauldron the fact that the AIADMK is on the decline, terminal or otherwise, then one cannot see much hope for the BJP.

There are always imponderables that could result in a dramatic revival of the AIADMK, and with it the BJP’s future in the state.

Well, one can always fantasise, but the odds seem to be against a saffron surge any time soon.

TN Gopalan is a senior journalist based in Chennai. Views expressed are the author’s own.