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The perception that the south of India was a bulwark against the Bharatiya Janata Party’s brand of Hindutva politics may have taken a beating on Tuesday, June 4, when the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections were declared. Five years ago, during the 2019 general elections, the BJP failed to win even a single seat in three of the five southern states – Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh. Fast forward to today and the party has managed to win seats in all the southern states barring Tamil Nadu. Even in Tamil Nadu, its total vote share saw an increase from 3.6% to 11.03%.
Notable among the right-wing party’s victories was in Kerala’s Thrissur, where its star candidate, actor Suresh Gopi, won with a big margin. This is a major triumph for the party, which has been struggling to open an account in Kerala, with Suresh Gopi becoming its first candidate from the state to win in a general election.
In Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram too, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the BJP candidate, posed a fierce challenge to three-time MP Shashi Tharoor of the Congress during the initial hours of counting. At one point, Rajeev was leading with a margin of over 20,000 votes, leading many to think that the BJP would win two seats in Kerala, one more than the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF), which managed to win only a single seat. But towards the end, when the votes in the coastal areas began to get counted, Tharoor cruised to win a fourth consecutive term as MP.
Both Kerala and Tamil Nadu have so far been challenging electoral battlegrounds for the BJP.
In Kerala, although the BJP had, in 2014, managed to increase its vote share from 5% to 13% and the NDA’s share went up from 10% to 15.64%, it had failed to send even a single member to the parliament. But this did not demotivate their leadership, including PM Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who repeatedly voiced their ambition to gain a foothold in the state. Suresh Gopi’s victory can be seen as a result of the efforts put in by BJP’s top leaders, who campaigned intensively in Thrissur.
A bulk of the seats that the BJP won in south India came from Karnataka, which is often termed the party’s ‘gateway’ to the southern region. Out of the total 25 seats it contested, the BJP won 17 while its ally JD(S) secured 2. However, this is a decrease from 2019, when the BJP registered a thumping victory by winning 27 out of the total 28 seats in the state, securing a total vote percentage of over 51%. Despite the setback it faced during the 2023 Karnataka Assembly elections, the BJP is still a significant force in the southern state, primarily because of the support it enjoys from two powerful communities – Lingayats and Vokkaligas.
In Andhra Pradesh, which has a total of 25 Lok Sabha seats, the BJP managed to win 3 seats and also massively increase its vote share to 11.35% – from 0.98% in 2019. Its alliance partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) – the TDP and JSP – managed to win 16 and 2 seats respectively. Meanwhile, the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP), which won 22 seats in 2019, was restricted to just 4 seats. This is a state where the BJP has won seats only when they are in alliance, and this time too, their victory can be attributed to the alliance.
Another state in the south where the BJP has tasted success in the recent past is Telangana. The party has managed to double its tally from 2019 to 8 seats now. This, however, did not come as a surprise, as the party had seen an increase in its vote share during the 2023 Assembly elections as well. The BJP has been steadily making inroads in Telangana with vociferous and controversial leaders like Bandi Sanjay, Arvind Dharmapuri, and others. The BJP, and even the Congress, winning more seats in the state is also because of the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) ceding its space. Ever since its loss in the Assembly election, the BRS has lost a lot of its leaders and hardly campaigned in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls.