[NEWS #Alert] Why India’s south confounds the otherwise all-conquering Narendra Modi! – #Loganspace AI

AFTER ITScrushing election victory last month, Narendra Modi’s authorities moved hasty on one entrance. It unveiled a draft education policy which aimed to fetch the discover about of Hindi, the necessary language of the “cow belt” of northern India, compulsory in faculties in non-Hindi speaking states. Nonetheless then Mr Modi did a—for him—untypical ingredient: he hasty withdrew the proposal after it triggered instantaneous uproar within the south.

The episode changed into illuminating. Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Occasion(BJP)dominates the cow belt. It has made inroads into japanese aspects of the nation that are now not frail strongholds. Nonetheless the brouhaha over Hindi presentations how the south aloof dances to a diverse tune, one theBJPhas now not but mastered.

In Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu (with 72m inhabitants, the south’s most populous explain), theBJPwon now not a single parliamentary seat. Voters in Tamil Nadu even punished its local ally, theAIADMK. In Telangana, now not too lengthy within the past hived off from Andhra Pradesh, theBJPwon simplest four seats, proper one better than its nationwide rival, the Congress social gathering. Only in Karnataka, where theBJPhas lengthy sought to develop a immoral, did the social gathering field up a factual showing. That changed into thanks partly to north Indian migrants to the tech hub of Bangalore; partly thanks to a true following in northern Karnataka among Lingayats, a abundant Hindu sect; and partly out of voters’ disillusionment with the parties in energy at the explain level, to which theBJPgives the necessary opposition. In all, south India claims 130 seats in parliament. TheBJPwon proper 29 of them.

The south, and in all likelihood Tamil Nadu above all, stays but another nation. Its distinctive historical previous feeds a mode of exceptionalism. The local Dravidians, as against the “Aryan” other folks of north India, are each and each comfortable with their frail historical previous and fasten in mind themselves to maintain been deprecated by India’s largely northern nation-builders.

Distinctions are living on. Within the north, Muslims suspected of killing cows fetch lynched. Within the south, red meat is widely eaten and when the Supreme Court bannedjallikattu, a Tamil manufacture of bull-baiting, a complete lot of thousands changed into out in disclose. The south has lengthy been readier than the north to agitate against the strictures of caste. Southerners are extra relaxed about religion: Banyan’s driver in Chennai patronised diverse Hindu temples but went to church too. The most religiously strident are as more in all probability to be atheists. Practically every town in Tamil Nadu boasts a statue of the abundant social reformer E.V. Ramasamy, or Periyar. He mature to burn pictures of the Hindu god Rama, at whose supposed birthplace theBJPneeds to develop a temple.

Increased prosperity than the north reinforces southern exceptionalism. Nonetheless above all, the exceptionalism coalesces around language. A Tamil political identity changed into forged as a long way relief as 1937, throughout the principle agitations, led by Periyar, against the compulsory instructing of Hindi. Renewed language protests in 1965, when college students field hearth to themselves, paved the kind for theDMK, a hasten-off of Periyar’s movement, to fetch explain energy.

Since then, energy has alternated between it and theAIADMK, but another splinter. Given the significance of language, no surprise titans of the Tamil film substitute lengthy dominated the explain’s politics, a saga proper as melodramatic as these screened in cinemas. Muthuvel Karunanidhi, a screenwriter, poet and wearer of spacious sun shades, died simplest last year, at the age of 94. He managed to reside much longer than his arch-enemy, Jayalalithaa, who now rests next to him on Chennai’s Marina beach. (She cherished to reveal that she changed into the finest one who could perhaps well abolish Mr Modi.) Right this moment, as a minimum three youthful Tamil film stars like their probabilities as successors. Nonetheless, as A.R. Venkatachalapathy of the Madras Institute of Style Research puts it, if a Bollywood well-known particular person were to tear down a road in Chennai, he wouldn’t fetch a 2nd discover about.

Can the south live proof against Mr Modi’s northern nationalism, embodied within the slogan “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan”? Pranav Kuttaiah of the Centre for Policy Research in Recent Delhi argues that, within the face of theBJP’s ideological onslaught, the identities of many south Indians are hardening around their explain and its predominant language—Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Malayalam in Kerala, Kannada in Karnataka. In diverse phrases, theBJP’s identitarian politics are spawning imitators across the south. That would now not attain much to advance the glory for diversity which Dravidians mature to recommend consistent with northern chauvinism.