If the BJP hasn’t started to worry about Haryana and Maharashtra election results yet, they have to, henceforth at least. Ascribing from the state, from where the political social coalition strategy originated, which the BJP trying to mimic laboriously on their present electoral struggle across various states, I am intrigued by the ingraining social phenomenon and felt necessary to point out that it’s now or never for the BJP to witness the tip of the iceberg of the downfall are they inching towards. The normative discourse on the social coalition is one of the long-held academic dialogue on the study of polity and Political Sociology and its impacts are also widely assessed. As I stated before, Tamil Nadu (TN) is the classic case for the BJP’s current electoral playbook. But it missed the quintessential perspective, about the former’s functional narrative, due to its lack of vision between means and ends.
TN, a state which is excelling in all health and wealth indicators and achieved significant progress in economic growth and resource distribution, gathered its political milieu through tumultuous years of demonstrations and hard negotiations of communities with establishments. Seen through its social prism, it is the state peopled mostly by backward communities but the power centers were structured around and positioned by socially, and (though it’s inundated) economically forwarded communities in the initial years of the republic. This power disparity is one of the significant exacerbating factors which fueled the rise of subaltern politics in the state which is not given due regard often, if not acknowledged. Social wealth distribution and economic expansion through a cultural construct (a Tamil identity proposition) viz-a-viz inclusivity with secular credentials, is where the BJP lost its trope.
Inclusivity and prosperity have a normative semblance, which is highly regarded in the ‘common sense’ (Gramscian) of subaltern communities. An aversion to it in the Northern part of India stems from its historical accounts. The accumulation of mistrust between communities has been constantly propelled, as the political establishments shied away from reconciliation, thanks to the partition crisis. The BJP and its political predecessors always held a strong belief in cashing out on this emotive exchequer. But after making victorious strides entrenching themselves militantly in the ’90s, only they realized their contingency in political consistency.
Now they’ve lucked out by Modi for the past five years, after a decade of humiliating defeats, through his expediency in stitching social coalitions and placing the helm with the socially burden-less actor. It worked out quite well, until recently, across various states attributing coherence in negotiations through various political actors, but after the emergence of distraught among social coalitions about the lopsided consensus- despite the means- in the ends. Glaring attributions can be proposed towards the increasing agitation of social elites against the coalition of subalterns, in and out of the establishment. And Tamil Nadu provides a walk away from this binary constraints. Though the state's electoral politics and coalitions structured around placing the helm at influential but also socially less burdened leader/actor, the progressive ends, not just the means, serves the vitality and supremacy to the argument, in this case, social coalition. After long due although TN has awakened from the slumber, after realizing it’s restrainedness of the recent political reality, the coalition entrenchments hasn't weakened.
The BJP’s lack of progressive ends, let alone the posture and optics, draining out its electoral strategy if not obliterating its drawn lines of negotiations. TN’s Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha are from both corners of the social spectrum, the former is from the most oppressed community and the latter belongs to socially elite section, held power not only by relying on coalitions but through their progressive political measures and means of distribution with the persuasion on inclusive ideals. If BJP didn’t smell the fact that their othering out strategy might be numbered, it won’t be long before ‘Gramscian’ consciousness starts ticking in subalterns. So the sailing on the enmity centered coalition needs an immediate corrective and back to the drawing board measures to strike an effective consensus among coalition, forsaking the ruling party’s polemical dreams and myths.
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