Why the south of India is no longer impervious to the saffron march Premium

South and north Indian history diverge in response to Hindutva, with south India resisting more than the north.

Trajectories of north and south Indian history have moved at different levels. Unlike north India, where history is often a recollection of invasions and wars, massacres and destruction, the south’s has been more about accommodation, assimilation and affirmation. As recounted by historian Romila Thapar in her landmark work, History of Early India, “The Arabs settled permanently in the coastal regions of the west and the south from about the eighth and ninth centuries. They were welcomed, given land for trading stations and left free to practise their religion, as had been the convention with Christians earlier in south India....Among the more interesting aspects of Arab settlements along the west coast is that each group adopted some of the customary law, and even some forms of worship, from the local community with whom they had the closest contact.” It is in stark contrast to what happened in north India with the invasion of Sindh by Mohammed bin Qasim in 712 CE, and later the raids of Mahmud of Ghazni.

The dichotomy continues to this day. For instance, while north India has been awash with resurgent Hindutva since the time of the Ayodhya dispute, and the consequent othering of fellow citizens of other faiths, large tracts of south India have consistently resisted the march of Hindutva forces. In the general elections last summer, the Bharatiya Janata Party failed to gain even one seat in Tamil Nadu, and won one seat in Kerala.

But the limited electoral success does not necessarily mean that the south is impervious to the saffron march. Arguing that Hindutva is a real force which needs to be contended within theoretical and empirical terms, journalist and writer Nissim Mannathukkaren and several other writers including Christophe Jaffrelot, T.T. Sreekumar, Anil M. Varughese, J. Devika and others examine the rise of Hindu nationalism in Kerala in a new book, Hindu Nationalism in South India (Routledge). Placing Kerala in the context of south India, several essays examine the rise of Hindutva in relation to the State’s history, caste, culture, post-truth, ideology, gender, politics and the Indian national space.

“Hindu nationalism appears ‘more confident, proud, brazen and belligerent than ever before’,” Mannathukkaren writes in the Introduction, quoting Edward Anderson and Arkotong Longkumer. But the expansion is not just electoral, it is also socio-cultural, he says. That is why despite the lack of comparable electoral success in Kerala and south India, “it is vital to map the tectonic changes that are happening at a discursive level across India,” he writes. Mannathukkaren explains how despite the absence of seats on the electoral charts, the BJP’s vote share has been on the upswing in Kerala, and to a lesser extent in Tamil Nadu.

“An electoral analysis of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the BJP in Kerala shows that they increased the vote share from 6.31% in 2009 to 10.83% in 2014, and further to 15.20% in 2019. While the increase in votes has not been enough to win any seats, the changes are very important considering that the Hindu population is only around 55% in the State,” he notes. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won one seat in Kerala with actor-turned-politician Suresh Gopi winning from Thrissur, while the Congress-led United Democratic Front bagged 18 of 20 Lok Sabha seats.

In Telangana, the BJP won four parliamentary seats in 2019. In the 2023 Assembly Elections, it increased its vote share from 6.9% (2018) to 13.90%, its total votes from 14.43 lakh to 32.51 lakh and its seats from one to eight. Effectively, every seventh voter had bought the BJP’s narrative of Hindu nationalism. The saffron gains in the south are real, and could in the foreseeable future, be tangible too.

The most significant saffron gains have been in Karnataka where the BJP made an electoral breakthrough as early as 1991. According to Mannathukkaren, “South India as a whole cannot be generalised for there are regional variations among States, such as the significant advancement of Hindutva in Karnataka. But crucially, there are variations even within States (thus, there are frontiers within States); for example, in coastal Karnataka, the BJP has won all three seats since 2000. Unique demographic and sociocultural factors gave rise to a virulent Hindutva much before many other places.”