Ashutosh Varshney says, “Without antagonism towards Muslims for the ‘historical wrongs’ committed by Muslim rulers in India’s past and the idea of ‘Muslim infidelity’ to India, the BJP won’t be what it is,” in his attempt to explain why the BJP’s Hindutva hit a wall in South India (‘There is North vs South’, IE, December 6). He hedges his bets by saying that these historic and ideological factors are only a part of the explanation. Imposition of Hindi and greater development in the southern states are the other factors in his reckoning.
He says, “The Hindu nationalist argument can resonate only in those parts of South India where Muslim princes ruled and discrimination against the Hindu subjects under their rule can be shown to exist…There is no such historical charge in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra. Hindu nationalism falls flat there.”
But the southern states mentioned are not the only regions where Hindu subjects did not suffer discrimination under Muslim rule. Gujarat is the strongest BJP fortress in the country by common consent. The BJP has been in power since 1995, well before Narendra Modi’s ascent (the Shankersinh Vaghela interregnum was not a break, as he led a rebel faction of the party). It has today 156 of the 182 legislators in the state assembly and all 26 members of Lok Sabha.
The only historic suffering Gujarat faced at the hands of Muslims was the CE 1026 sacking and destruction of the Somnath temple of Veraval by Mahmud of Ghazni. All through the remainder of the second millennium, Gujarat existed peacefully and even prospered under the nominal reign first of the Champaner and Ahmedabad sultanates and later of the Mughal viceroy. The various local nawabs and amirs were mostly benign rulers. Yet, as the statewide riots first in 1969 and later in 2002 show, the Gujarati displayed intense hostility towards Muslims, not caused by any historic sense of victimhood.
The RSS is undoubtedly the cradle of the Hindutva ideology, being its fount and articulator. Its chiefs and their major associates have been almost all brahmins from Maharashtra and northern Karnataka, formerly a part of the Bombay province (the two non-Maharashtrian Sarsanghchalaks, Rajendra Singh and K S Sudarshan, account for only 15 of its 98-year existence). That region, on the southern periphery of the Bahmani Sultanate and the Mughal empire, was mostly left alone. It should have been like other parts of the peninsula, with not much historical charge. But the rise of the Marathas under Shivaji and the wide-spread bhakti movement ensured that a Hindu ideology (not the same as Hindutva, but with large areas of overlaps) rose and flourished there. The RSS cadres here in the mid-twentieth century nurtured and furthered it well before the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the precursor of the BJP, was formed.
Antagonism towards Muslims and a strong pull to the Hindutva ideology have thus found purchase even in some areas that did not suffer perdition under Muslim rule. The real question is why this happens in Gujarat and Maharashtra but not in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Varshney’s proffered explanation of a historical sense of victimhood being the root cause does not quite hold.
Varshney opines that imposition of Hindi on the southern states and the southerners’ indifference to welfare sops are the other factors blunting the BJP’s southward thrust. This too does not wash. Hindi has been a thorn in the side mainly of Tamil Nadu, but that has been so since 1967, when the DMK ousted Congress permanently from power. That was two decades before the rise of the BJP. And Congress, which was the proponent of Hindi then, is now a trusted ally of the DMK. In other southern states, opposition to Hindi is more pro-forma than a real issue.
As for doles, Tamil Nadu wrote the book on them, starting way back in 1967 when C N Annadurai’s DMK rose to power partly due to the promise of rice at a rupee per measure. That process has escalated ever since with more and more “revdis” announced at each new election. Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have not lagged far behind either. How, then, can Varshney conclude that election freebies are less appealing to the South?
The North-South divide in Indian polity is real and has been so for some time. But academics raising it to a faultline using untenable hypotheses based on cherry-picked anecdotal evidence does not quite explain that enigma; instead, it could add to the prevailing incendiary rhetoric.
The writer taught at IIM, Ahmedabad and was the founder-director of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand
The divide in the polity is real and has been so for some time
12
1
21.12.2023
Ashutosh Varshney says, “Without antagonism towards Muslims for the ‘historical wrongs’ committed by Muslim rulers in India’s past and the idea of ‘Muslim infidelity’ to India, the BJP won’t be what it is,” in his attempt to explain why the BJP’s Hindutva hit a wall in South India (‘There is North vs South’, IE, December 6). He hedges his bets by saying that these historic and ideological factors are only a part of the explanation. Imposition of Hindi and greater development in the southern states are the other factors in his reckoning.
He says, “The Hindu nationalist argument can resonate only in those parts of South India where Muslim princes ruled and discrimination against the Hindu subjects under their rule can be shown to exist…There is no such historical charge in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra. Hindu nationalism falls flat there.”
But the southern states mentioned are not the only regions where Hindu subjects did not suffer discrimination under Muslim rule. Gujarat is the strongest BJP fortress in the country by common consent. The BJP has been in power since 1995, well before Narendra........
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