In its 1998 Pachmarhi Declaration, the Indian National Congress wanted a return to single-party rule for India. The declaration was very particular about the party standing on its own and not ceding turf to any partner parties for short-term political gains. Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have emulated this idea since they came to power in 2014, undermining their regional partners such as the Shironmani Akali Dal in Punjab, the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and different factions of the Janata Dal in northern and eastern India. Meanwhile the Congress, moving on from the ethos of Pachmarhi, has become a party espousing federal balance and a decentralised polity as it continues in its role as the main national party in opposition to the ruling BJP. This shift has happened only due to significant political inputs from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the ruling party in Tamil Nadu, which has built on the very successful Dravidian model of governance.
The DMK has been the main pillar of the opposition alliance standing against Modi and the BJP in the 2024 Indian general election. It has kept relationships between alliance partners intact by making necessary compromises. More importantly, it has devised strategies to counter the BJP’s formidable electoral machinery. Tamil Nadu itself has been a bulwark against Modi, the BJP and right-wing politics over the past ten years even as this triad has swept much of India – and this has been due to its long history of Dravidian politics, centred around equality, inclusivity and social cohesion.
Tamil Nadu has had a significant role and made crucial contributions in defining the outcome of the 2024 election. If the supposed invincibility of Narendra Modi has been dented and there is fair recognition of Rahul Gandhi and the Congress as political players of import, it is due in large part to the leadership provided by Tamil Nadu. The DMK, which is one of two major parties in the state, played a key role in establishing the cohesive opposition alliance called the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA). It has also led this alliance from the front in having the Congress as an integral part of opposition mobilisation.
M K Stalin, the DMK president and the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, told the other opposition parties that if a “Congress-free India” was the main slogan of the Modi-led BJP, then the opposition cannot mimic the BJP by forming a rainbow alliance without the Grand Old Party. With the frequently antagonistic Trinamool Congress, Aam Aadmi Party and Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the opposition mix, the BJP was convinced that resistance to the Congress would break any alliance once the election schedule was announced. However, Tamil Nadu and the DMK have made major interventions in the functioning of INDIA, which has changed the political narrative of Modi coasting to a landslide win that looked cast in stone even in January this year.
These interventions merit close examination. Tamil Nadu’s first major contribution is that its existence and functioning disproves the Gujarat model, which Modi touted as his great achievement when he ruled the state before 2014 and has since been promoting across all of India. The state presents the Dravidian model as a more viable path to socioeconomic progress for a subcontinent-sized country. Modi’s personal website has a detailed note on the Gujarat model, the salient feature of which is a reliance on the growth of three sectors – agriculture, industry and services. This model focusses less on social cohesion, religious harmony and social justice.
Tamil Nadu, through its social mobilisation over the course of a century as part of the Dravidian project, has established the limitations in this form of growth. A DMK spokesperson, and then the Tamil media, were the first to label the Gujarat model as the “AA Model” – the Ambani-Adani Model, named for India’s richest corporate houses – as it helped only the top tier of society and failed to address the issue of gross inequality. In a close reading of the numbers in 2017, the economist Maitreesh Ghatak revealed that the Gujarat model was a bubble waiting to burst. “If we rank states based on the percentage of people below the poverty line (with a higher rank signifying fewer people below the line) Gujarat’s comes 10th out of 20 major states,” he wrote. “With regard to infant mortality rate (deaths of children aged under a year per 1000 live births), Gujarat ranks 11th on a list of major states arranged from those with the lowest mortality rate to highest. On life expectancy, it ranks 10th and 7th for literacy.”
The Dravidian model, on the other hand, combines accelerated economic growth with an inclusive social vision; and social justice is the fulcrum of its developmental vision, where the dividends of progress are spread far more evenly. A World Bank report explains the achievement by stating,
Tamil Nadu is one of India’s richest states. Since 1994, the state has seen a steady decline in poverty, with the result that today, Tamil Nadu has lower levels of poverty than most other states in the country. Nevertheless, parts of the state still record high levels of poverty. After 2005, Tamil Nadu was among India’s fastest growing states, with growth being driven mainly by services. Although consumption inequality in the state decreased slightly after 2005, it still remains higher than in many other states.
The Tamil Nadu government recognises uneven growth across districts and has launched programmes to narrow the gap between developed and developing ones, which includes setting up a start-up mission to build entrepreneurial ecosystems in all districts. Further, the Public Affairs Centre, a Bengaluru-based think tank, has pointed out that Tamil Nadu has performed well on various social indicators such as law and order, women and children, the delivery of justice and environment.
In their book An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, the economists Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze explain the Tamil Nadu model through the lens of development economics. They show that Tamil Nadu’s progress has been the result of constructive state policies. On the question of universal and well-functioning public services in Tamil Nadu, they write, “Various interpretations have been proposed, focusing for instance on early social reforms including the ‘self-respect movement’ founded by Periyar in the 1920s, political empowerment of disadvantaged castes, the hold of populist politics, and the constructive agency of women in Tamil society …What is interesting is that these different interpretations point, in one way or another, to the power of democratic action.”
Tamil Nadu was one of the few states, along with others such as Kerala and Odisha, that rejected the BJP in both the 2014 and 2019 Indian elections. Tamil Nadu has still made substantial economic and social progress over the past decade while having nothing to do with the Gujarat model. The evidence-based narrative of the Dravidian model easily bursts the bubble of the rhetoric-based narrative bubble of the Gujarat model.
The second element of Tamil Nadu’s contribution to the anti-BJP opposition is in the primary imagination of what constitutes a responsive, democratic nation. The central element of the Dravidian model is the concept of self-respect and the dignity of all individuals. For nearly a century, the primary demands of the Dravidian movement were for an egalitarian society that lays emphasis on equality between men and women, economic parity, no caste hierarchy, no discrimination based on religion or varna, and general unity and friendship among the citizens of India. Here, the nation-state is imagined under a “coming together” model, as opposed to a “holding together” model. In a holding together model, the state is given greater importance than the legitimate aspirations of the people it rules. In a coming together model, the central focus falls on the people of the country and their aspirations, expectations and well-being.
Many of the Modi government’s policies made clear that the BJP follows a model of holding together and not coming together: the arbitrary roll-out of the Goods and Services Tax regime, the disastrous demonetisation in 2016, the authoritarian moves to abrogate Article 370 of the Indian constitution, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of special status and converting the state into two union territories. The Modi administration’s abuse of institutions such as the Enforcement Directorate, the Income Tax Department and the Central Bureau of Investigation to target the BJP’s political adversaries and the BJP engineering defections has also helped the opposition parties to see value in Tamil Nadu’s model. Though in the past, Tamil Nadu’s top leaders like J Jayalalithaa and M Karunanidhi targeted each other when in power using the police and the state’s legal apparatus, the competitive politics of the state was balanced by other institutions’ ability to provide checks and balances. The judiciary and media were relatively independent, and the animosity between the leaders did not undermine the efficacy of other institutions. In contrast, there has been a complete capitulation of central institutions under Modi.
Tamil Nadu’s third significant contribution has been to shift the narrative away from the supposed TINA, or “There Is No Alternative”, factor. This was entrenched in the run-up to the election by Delhi-based television studios subservient to Modi’s agenda, which pushed the line that the country had no leaders to turn to except Modi. Under this narrative, the vote has been presented as a presidential election, a referendum on individual politicians and their personalities, and the main question is who can match Narendra Modi’s charisma and popularity. In embracing this vision of hyper-centralised and personalised electoral power, the BJP also undermined its own regional leaders such as Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Nitin Gadkari and Rajnath Singh. The political conversations in Tamil Nadu, on the other hand, have articulated the need to shift the narrative away from a presidential-style vote centering around Modi and back to one focussed on the parliamentary format that has always been core to India’s political system. In this format, the fight is not between two or three individuals in a zero-sum contest for centralised power, but rather a truly decentralised and multimodal electoral contest spread across 543 parliamentary constituencies. This format brings out local issues that are buried under the focus on a centralised, presidential-style contest of the kind that the Modi-led BJP wanted in the 2024 general election.
The DMK’s major contribution to the INDIA bloc has been to rekindle this broad, parliamentary political focus. Instead of conceding to a debate on “Modi versus who?”, it has helped the INDIA bloc shift attention to the question of who the ideal representative is for each parliamentary constituency. This has forced Modi and his party to fight on multiple fronts, with different players in different states, rather than following their initial plan for a largely Modi-centric campaign. With this shift, the monochromatic narrative around Modi’s supposedly unparalleled abilities which was carefully built up over the last decade started crumbling. Modi had to confront M K Stalin in Tamil Nadu and a number of other regional challengers elsewhere: Siddaramaiah in Karnataka, Revanth Reddy in Telangana, Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray in Maharashtra, Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi and Punjab, Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh and Tejashwi Yadav in Bihar, among others. The political prism started showing multiple hues instead of the single colour of saffron, which the BJP and Modi believed would be the dominant colour in the 2024 elections – especially after Modi’s much-publicised consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya.
The fourth factor follows from this shift in narrative. The DMK understood that stretching the electoral process over seven phases between April 19 and June 1, as the Modi administration chose to do, may not work in the BJP’s favour despite the ruling government’s hold over the Election Commission. Such a long election would have given the BJP electoral dividends if the narrative around the campaign remained presidential in character. Recognising this, the DMK has galvanised the opposition alliance into making this an explicitly parliamentary contest. The DMK drew from its own experiences of helping establish coalition rule in New Delhi as part of the Janata experiment in 1977, the National Front in 1989, the United Front in 1996, the first full-term National Democratic Alliance in 1999, and the United Progressive Alliance in both 2004 and 2009. With that, it has been able to articulate the advantages to all participants of collective rule at the centre, by pointing out that the BJP’s consolidation of power allowed it to revoke Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir and also avoid upgrading Delhi and Pondicherry to full states. Moreover, the excesses committed by the BJP-nominated governors that have undermined the rights of the states across India also galvanised the opposition parties to work together.
The fifth factor in the DMK’s contribution has been its role in furthering the general political acceptance of the triad of ideas that makes up the Dravidian model. Such acceptance can be seen, for example, in a change in the campaign narrative by Modi himself who earlier criticised social spending as “freebies” but later started talking about the benefits of welfare schemes in his speeches.
The defining pillars of the Dravidian model are creating an inclusive social and governmental structure through effective interventions; promoting social cohesion through ideas of integration and the creation of a knowledge society, and the use of institutional mechanisms to confront divisive sociopolitical forces and create an enduring environment of harmony. Beyond just the state’s enviable growth and social indicators, a closer look reveals that a major part of Tamil Nadu’s story is the focus of the state on social cohesion, as opposed to the divisive rancour that is taking its toll in many parts of India under the BJP. With its triptych of social justice, tolerance and access for all, the Dravidian model has become the non-Gujarat model to be emulated for all of India. This is evident in how both NDA and INDIA party manifestos have drawn from the DMK manifesto. One of the reasons that senior BJP leaders have mounted an especially vicious attack on the Congress’ manifesto is that it espouses a firm commitment to social justice, affirmative action and restoring the federal balance of the Indian republic – all key parts of the DMK programme.
Whatever the numbers may show on 4 June when the votes are counted, two things are clear: the BJP lost its position of seemingly unassailable preeminence because of its extreme centralisation of power, and the DMK helped the opposition parties to realise the advantages of sticking together and not permitting their local or regional disagreements derail the larger project of protecting the democratic moorings of the Indian republic. The narrative today is no longer just about the fear of the all-powerful central government. Rather, it is at least as much about an accommodative union that respects the legitimate aspirations of regional parties and their constituents.
(A.S. Panneerselvan is the fellow at Roja Muthiah Research Library and head of its Centre for Study in Public Sphere in Chennai. Courtesy: Himal Southasian, Southasia’s first and only regional magazine of politics and culture. It seeks to be Independent, non-nationalist, pan-Subcontinental.)
