Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s concept of Kashi Tamil Sangamam is an innovative programme and has a huge political as well as cultural potential. It is aimed at transforming and giving a 21st-century twist to one of the most significant cultural conversations of southern India—that of Dravidianism. The BJP has successfully overcome its earlier image as a North Indian party, but Tamil Nadu has always eluded it. Now, the party’s focus on Tamil Nadu is only going to increase in the coming months. For that, it has to confront the biggest stumbling block of what has come to be regarded as a certain kind of Tamil exceptionalism.
One of the central goals of Kashi Tamil Sangamam is to take on and decimate Dravidianism by countering it with an excessive demonstration of a broader Tamil culturalism.
In his 23-year-old political career, Modi as Gujarat’s chief minister and then the prime minister focused on Tamil epics and literature in many of his public addresses, even including international fora. In his 106the episode of “Mann Ki Baat” radio connect, Modi made it a point to interact with Tamil artisans—labourers, drivers, and retired Army personnel. These engagements are aimed at creating an alternative Tamil narrative to the exclusivist Dravidianism—reaping electoral gains by social re-engineering. It is the final frontier for the BJP-RSS nationalist ideology.
As soon as the recent assembly election results started trickling in last month, there was the unfortunate North-South divide bogey that made a comeback. This is the entrenched narrative that Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah want to dismantle.
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Ending the North-South divide
North Indians in Tamil Nadu, especially BJP supporters, are pejoratively called ‘cow urine drinkers’ or ‘pani puri sellers’. Or as Hindi-speaking bhaiyyas. Such slangs will now be countered in a holistic way. Not as a tit-for-tat, but by enveloping Tamil culture in the larger narrative of the nation. To take on the biggest Dravidian advocates, DMK, politically, Modi unleashed political attacks on one side and the ED on the other. But that is not enough to bring down an ideology that is deeply embedded in Tamilians’ psyche. So, now he plans to do it with activities such as Kashi Tamil Sangamam. It’s a carefully constructed strategy to stitch together Tamil and Hindi, Tamilians with North Indians. The BJP wishes to induce nationalism into Tamil cultural politics. In the past ten years, the recipients of Padma Awards have mostly been from the South. Fruit growers, millet producers, puppeteers, dancers, bamboo basket knitters have received the ‘people’s Padma Awards’.
Modi inaugurated the 15-day Kashi Tamil Sangamam festival on 17 December in Varanasi. The event will include cultural programmes, reading of Tamil epics, seminars, and visits to temples in Uttar Pradesh. He launched the multi-language and Braille translations of Thirukkural, Manimekalai, and other Tamil literary classics.
The Central Institute of Classical Tamil carried out this extensive work in these translations with the support of the Union government and Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath. Modi flagged off the Kanyakumari-Varanasi Tamil Sangamam train by saying this furthered the spirit of ‘ek Bharat, shreshtha Bharat’. He said the ties between Kashi and Tamil Nadu are both ‘emotional and creative’.
At the inaugural event of Kashi Tamil Sangamam, Modi even tried real-time translation using Artificial Intelligence. Tamil students were thrilled to hear the opportunity to listen to the PM speak in Tamil with the help of AI.
But beneath all this cultural bhai-bhai talk is the Modi-Shah-Yogi trimurti. And they have decided to bring an Article 370-like disruption in Tamil politics if and when they win a third term in 2024. Senior leaders in the BJP say that the party wants to squeeze out the separatist Dravidian impulse from Tamil cultural politics. They also believe that its shelf life is fast fading away.
The immediate political impetus for this is the Congress victory in Telangana and the subsequent tweets about North-South divide. Modi and Shah wish to smash this theory. There is now a clear Look South policy in the BJP taking shape.
The author tweets @RAJAGOPALAN1951. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)