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http://www.dailyexcelsior.com/01aug13/edit.htm#4

The Dravidian-Hindustva alliance

By Jayant Muralidharan

Till the other day, Tamil Nadu was one state where the advent of the Sangh

parivar was considered unthinkable. An impregnable ideological barrier was

presumed to encounter the Hindutva brigade. The supposedly deep roots struck by

the Dravidian ideology in Tamil Nadu, it was taken for granted, would not let

the alien plant, even a grafted version of it, grow. It was the pleasures of a

facile presumption ! Why has the proposition not survived the test of time ?

The most striking proof of the Hindutva politics that has entered Tamil Nadu’s

political soul is that the BJP today enjoys the status of the second position

in a major front, headed by the DMK, which has an anti-Hindutva record and is

avowedly anti-Hindu, even anti-theist. Political expediency alone does not

explain this particular transformation of Tamil Nadu.

It is true that Tamil Nadu’s rulers, of the regionalist variety in particular,

have always preferred an alliance with the power-wielders at the Centre. The

alliance, by which the DMK has given the BJP a mile where the AIADMK has

allowed it an inch, is more than analogous to the AIADMK-Congress pact of the

MGR/Jayaallitha-Rajiv past. Dravidian vesteran M. Karunanidhi has conducted

himself earlier as a satrap of the Centre under prime ministers as politically

varied as Indira Ganhi, V. P. Singh and Inder Gujral. But his role as a votary

of Vajpayee and his government raises questions that politics of merely routine

convenience would not.

The sad fact is that no Dravidian party has resisted the temptation of a

profitable tie-up with the BJP. It was the AIADMK that gave the BJP a toehold

in Tamil Nadu. Now, when Karunanidhi scoffs at the anti-BJP camp’s talk of

‘communalism’, he sounds quite the same as a Hindutva hardliner castigating

‘pseudo-secularism’.

Even more unblushing is the adoration of the BJP by the Marumalarchi DMK (MDMK),

which claims to be the ‘real’ DMK. It is more a ‘I-am-pro-BJP-than-thou’

slanging match that has been taking place between the MDMK and the DMK.

The commonality between both the ideologies consists in the basics upon which

either envisages popular mobilisation. The Hindutva camp seeks to mobilise its

constituency on communal or majoritarian lines. Dravidianism aims to do so on

caste lines. Neither of them is for mobilising the people on either a

compositely national basis or on class lines, as either Indians or a

socio-economic interest group.

Guru Golwalkar, arch-ideologue of the RSS, in his Bunch of Thoughts, openly

declared communism as one of the three main enemies of the RSS (the other two

being Islam and Christianity) because that unholy and alien ideology was

against mobilising Hindus as Hindus. The Dravidian ideologues may not have been

as candid in their ornately alliterative rhetoric. But they were no different in

the chauvinist mobilisation of their own variety.

The Dravidian movement, while being anti-communist in its formative period,

borrowed bits and pieces of Left radicalism and tried to make these a part of

its own baggage. The disguise was intended to help it disarm what them appeared

its natural enemy. Tamil Nadu’s political history is proof that the trick has

paid off. Before the undivided DMK replaced the Congress in 1967, it had

replaced the Left as the main opposition. It is for the Left and the liberals

to ask themselves : were not the unchallenged ideological claims behind the

unchecked advance of Dravidianism ?

The core of these claims is that the Dravidian casteism is actually social

reform. To question this claim even mildly today is to enter a fiercely

contentious territory. Questioned, however, it must be, if the

Dravidian-Hindutva compact is to be comprehended.

What is wrong with Dravidianism is not its origin in anti-Brahminism, neither as

opposition to the decadent values of Brahminism nor as a challenge to the social

dominance of the Brahmin community. This was the natural starting point of a

social reform movement here as in many other parts of India. Even nationalist

poet Subramania Bharati and the Hindu’s founder-editor G. Subramania Iyer, who

condemned the precursors of Dravidianism as compradores, set themselves against

Brahminism when they espoused the cause of wide-ranging social reforms,

especially women’s emancipation.

The early Dravidian movement degenerated for a time into crude Brahmin-bashing,

and its excesses (like the forceful cutting of individual Brahmins’ sacred

threads and tufts) hardly endeared the avowed cause to the peace-loving

majority of the Tamil people. The rationale of anti-Brahminism, however,

remained, though it may not have lost all of its ideological relevance even

today. For, a set of socio-cultural values upheld by the upper crust or castes

still remins to frustrate a reborn Bharati or Subramania Iyer. This set of

values has lately acquired a new sanction at the national level. And it is the

Drvidian camp that has brazenly tied up, time and again, with the all-Indian

party of opperessive Brahminism.

The uninterrupted rule of anti-Brahminism has not de-Brahminised Tamil society.

It has only created new Brahmins. The intermediary castes, empowered by

anti-Brahminism, have only gone on to emulate their erstwhile social superiors

and provide today an expanding base for the BJP and even the more rabid of its

relatives in the parivar. It is under rulers spouting Dravidian rhetoric about

a casteless society that Tamil Nadu has seen increasing caste conflicts and a

steep decline in the status of oppressed Dalits.

All this only shows a degeneration of Dravidianism, once the ideology of a

crusading social reform movement. Chronicles of the movement reveal that it

bore within itself seeds of its own Brahminisation and its historic compromise

with Hindutva.

Narendra Subramanian, in his insightful study of the Dravidian movement

Ethnicity and Populist Mobilisation – Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy

in South India (OUP, 1999), says : "Despite Periar’s (Dravidian ideologue E. V.

Ramasamy Naicker’s) critique of religion and Hinduism, a section of Tamil

Hindus (BCs) occupied the core of Periar’s vision of the Dravidian community,

while other Hindus and non-Hindus were relegated to the margins. Besides,

Periar viewed his movement as primarily engaged in an effort to reform Tamil

Nadu’s Hindu society. These features of the early Dravidianist vision made it

possible to find common ground with Hindu revivalism."

Subramanian recounts : "When both Hindu and Muslim religious leaders denounced a

DK (Dravida Kazhagam) campaign to break idols of the Hindu Pillayar (Ganesh)

deity, Periar warned Muslims not to impede a movement that had arisen from

within the Hindu community. Following this definition of his movement, he

instructed Muslim party members to keep away from the agitation. Further, he

threatened that DK activists would play music in front of mosques if Muslim

leaders did not withdraw their objections to the agitation, reaching down into

the bag of tricks Hindu chauvinists had assembled well before."

The Dravidian ideology, thus, could never have been Tamil Nadu’s reliable

bulwark against the saffron brigade. A sustained Left-liberal ideological

struggle against Dravidianism, on the contrary, could have prevented the growth

of this unholy alliance that had irrationally been presumed to be impossible.

INAV

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