Modi Mania in South India

The BJP’s PM aspirant is popular here but cannot count on the region for number

Despite his frequent visits to India’s four southern states, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi will have to look elsewhere for Lok Sabha numbers. The south is largely dominated by regional parties, and even the smaller of these are not easy for the BJP to either dislodge or forge alliances with.

In Bangalore, the talking point is the Rs 10 that each attendee recently paid as an entry fee to hear Modi speak at the city’s palace grounds. At its conclusion, Karnataka’s BJP unit handed over a cheque of Rs 35 lakh to Modi to help fund his dream Sardar Patel statue project back home in Gujarat.

To shore up support in the run-up to the General Election of 2014, Modi has been making periodic visits to urban centres in the south. Yet, the region has been cold to the saffron party all these years since its 1990s emergence as a force in north and west India. Barring Karnataka, the south has been uncharted territory for the BJP, and while Modi may attract crowds, how well the party can possibly perform here remains a matter of doubt. Of the region’s 130 Lok Sabha seats—42 in Andhra Pradesh, 39 in Tamil Nadu, 28 in Karnataka and 20 in Kerala, apart from Puducherry’s sole seat—the BJP leader cannot expect a tally worth talking about.

Fragmentation is the story of the south. Take a look at the composition of the current Lok Sabha for a sense of the strength that regional parties command. To represent Tamil Nadu, the AIADMK has nine seats, the DMK 18, and the MDMK and VCK one each. From Andhra Pradesh, the TRS has two, YSR Congress two, TDP six, and the MiM one. As for Karnataka, the JD-S and KJP have one seat each (earlier, the JD-S had three but it lost two in recent bypolls). From Kerala, the Kerala Congress (Mani) faction has one, while the rest are shared among others by the IUML, CPM and CPI (while the latter two are not regional parties, they have no pan-Indian presence either).

What makes the going difficult for the BJP is the fact that these regional parties have managed to hold their own, even those that have just one or two seats. In such a scenario, while AP and Karnataka has seen mandates in favour of a national party—be it the Congress or BJP—the other two states have stuck to candidates of other parties, many of which have shared power with a coalition at the Centre. Over the past decade, it is the UPA that they have shared power with. This time round, the BJP hopes to go one up on the UPA by roping in regional allies. Is this likely?

In Andhra Pradesh, the BJP is yet to formally announce an alliance with any party, though the TDP was part of the Vajpayee-led NDA and has thus been a BJP partner at the Centre. The TDP’s chief, N Chandrababu Naidu, once a United Front leader, was the state’s CM in 1998 when the NDA assumed power. While Naidu left the NDA after it lost power in 2004, citing Gujarat’s anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002, he was never able to recover the electoral support he lost over the NDA’s term in power. Now, having lost two Assembly terms to the Congress in his home state, Naidu has been the first among the BJP’s ex-partners to reach out to Modi after he was named the party’s PM candidate.

But as it happens, the TDP is still on shaky ground. Its traditional support base in the Seemandhra part of AP is at threat of being overrun by Jaganmohan Reddy, the son of former Congress CM YS Rajasekhara Reddy who broke away to set up the YSR Congress. Jagan, under CBI investigation for his assets being out of proportion to his known income, was released from prison not long ago and has been issuing statements in praise of Modi since then. This suggests that he may not be averse to a tie-up with the BJP.

Since AP’s state polls were held together with the General Election of 2009, the state is likely to hold both of them simultaneously again in 2014. If the state splits into Seemandhra and Telangana by then, it could impact electoral outcomes. The YSR Congress sniffs victory in Seemandhra while the Congress hopes to win big in Telangana.

That would leave the TDP in the cold for a third term. In alliance with the BJP, a potential Modi wave in the region may help the party somewhat, but this would only be for the Lok Sabha. On its own, the BJP may win a seat or two at best. All said, most of AP’s 42 seats are likely to go to regional parties and the Congress.

In Tamil Nadu, decades of experience have shown that the Congress is the only national party that can win a few seats on its own, and that too, in alliance with either the AIADMK or DMK, the state’s two big Dravidian parties. The AIADMK’s J Jayalalithaa, who is currently CM, is seen as a personal friend of Modi, but while her equation with him is cordial, she has a vote calculus to deal with of which a minority vote swing would be a part. More significantly, Jayalalithaa has prime ministerial ambitions of her own, the calculation being that in case a rag-tag coalition takes shape in 2014 (supported, say, by a national party), she would have a claim to the top post by potential virtue of being a regional party with the formation’s largest number of seats.

Even if the BJP has a seat-sharing deal with the AIADMK, it will be difficult for the party to win on its own strength since NaMo mania is an urban phenomena if anything, restricted to Chennai, Coimbatore and perhaps Tiruchirapalli, where Modi received a rapturous welcome two months ago.

The mood could yet change.

The BJP’s best bet would be to lure the AIADMK as a regional ally. Possible? During Modi’s October visit to Chennai, Jaya snubbed him by not turning up at a Madras University function where both were scheduled to speak. While the media highlighted Jaya’s own PM ambitions as a reason for keeping equally away from the BJP and Congress , observers felt she did not want to upset minority voters who could play a key role in her sweeping the state in 2014 as she did in 2011’s Assembly polls. In the current Lok Sabha, the DMK has 18 seats while the AIADMK has nine of the 39 in all (the rest are held by the Congress and smaller regional parties).

Around the time Cyclone Phailin was to hit India’s eastern seaboard, Modi was in Chennai to deliver a lecture on ‘India and the world’. The country, he declared, would soon be hit by a ‘cyclone of change’. That morning, Chennai residents awoke to the strange sight of the road from the airport to the venue bedecked in saffron with banners extending ‘a heartly welcome to the next PM of India.’ Political commentator Cho Ramaswamy, who is said to be close to Jaya, declared that Modi would soon address the nation from 7 Race Course Road (the PM’s official residence in New Delhi) on the strength of an AIADMK-BJP alliance.

But that still isn’t an obvious deal. While Jaya had congratulated Modi on his becoming the BJP campaign committee chief, she did not call him after he was named the party’s PM candidate. In a rally in September in Tiruchirapalli, Modi had refrained from making any reference to either Jaya or the DMK.

This was after Jaya had let her ministers mark their presence alongside UPA ministers visiting to launch central schemes, and around the time that the DMK’s M Karunanidhi had sought BJP support for a bypoll in Yercaud.

The DMK, which has kept low since its rout in 2011, has a family succession crisis to resolve. Its official ally right now, the Congress, recently bowed to a DMK demand by keeping the PM away from a Commonwealth meet in Colombo in protest against Sri Lanka’s treatment of its Tamil minority (especially during the country’s 2009 battle against the LTTE).

In Kerala, the BJP has never won a seat in either Assembly or Lok Sabha polls. This will not change. The saffron party still has no chance of its own in 2014, nor of any significant partner. Elections in this state are always a direct fight between regional alliances led by the Congress and CPM. Though Modi has toured the state and even visited godwoman Mata Amritanandamayi, who has a huge following, it is unlikely such sporadic support will translate into votes for the BJP.

That leaves only Karnataka, where the BJP has done well over the past two decades. Presently, it has 19 MPs, one of whom, BY Raghavendra, Yeddyurappa’s son, has joined the KJP floated by his father. Though the BJP lost the Assembly polls in May 2013 to the Congress, recent opinion polls show that Modi as the BJP’s candidate may have sparked a revival in its fortunes.

The BJP may fare even better if Yeddyurappa, who was expelled after corruption charges were levelled against him, rejoins the party and the KJP plays spoiler no more. The BJP’s flip-flops over Yeddyurappa, who is considered close to Modi, make for plenty of political entertainment in Karnataka. But this time serious calculations could bring the scam-tainted former CM back into the saffron fold.

At the end, while Modi does have support in the South that is disproportionate to the BJP’s overall presence in the region, there is no question of a NaMo wave that could make much of a difference to his Lok Sabha tally.

BJPNarendra ModiPM