BJP’s Rubik’s Cube challenge in Tamil Nadu

For years, Tamil Nadu has remained the Bharatiya Janata Party’s unsolvable Rubik’s Cube. Which way should the party move the pieces so that the saffron clicks into place, neatly? The BJP’s problem is that it has been unable to align the passionately lived religiosity of the people of Tamil Nadu with its own brand of Hindutva. Twist this way or that, the two are positioned at an impossible angle that defy all attempts to bring them on the same side.

The Ram temple’s inauguration in Ayodhya on 22 January, 2024 created barely a ripple in Tamil Nadu (it’s another matter that it failed the BJP even in Uttar Pradesh). It was the only state that saw no Hindu-Muslim violence following the BJP-led destruction of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. Hindutva bogeys such as ‘love jihad’ and ‘land jihad’ commonly used in the othering of religious minorities have failed to create the kind of combustible communal atmosphere in Tamil Nadu that prevails in some states of north India that advantages the BJP. The Kashi Tamil Sangamam, an attempt to “de-dravidise” the south by drawing on its cultural and religious links with the north may have helped UP tourism, but has not had the impact that the BJP imagined in Tamil Nadu.

The party’s desperation to whip up something akin to Hindutva fervour is evident as the 2026 Tamil Nadu state assembly elections draw closer. Before the 2021 elections, the BJP had adopted Lord Murugan, also known as Skanda or Subramania, and by several other names to broaden its appeal to voters in the state. The god is back again as the flavour of the season, but the BJP’s Rubik’s Cube challenge remains.

Murugan is a uniquely Tamil god. Depicted as Lord Siva’s son, and the brother of Ganesha in the Hindu tradition, Murugan is however also believed to be a pre-Vedic warrior deity who was worshipped by the ancient Tamils. According to Murugan mythology, he has six abodes that all fall within the state, four of them located on a hill, one by the sea and another on a hillock on the banks of Kaveri. Further cementing his Tamil identity, Sangam literature has many references to the god.

In both mythology and iconography, Murugan is a boy god who rides a peacock and carries a spear, or vel in Tamil. The weapon symbolises victory over evil forces, knowledge over ignorance. Defying court orders against large gatherings at the time of the 2020 Covid pandemic, then BJP state unit president L Murugan took out a “vel yatra” to all six of Murugan’s abodes, to culminate on December 6 at the Murugan temple by the sea in Tiruchendur, forcing a union of the Tamil deity with Hindutva’s Project Ayodhya in the north. The use of the word “yatra” was meant to evoke the original “rath yatra”, and the importance given to the vel during the journey sought to portray the Murugan and his worship as war-like, in keeping with Hindu aggression in the north. The BJP, in alliance with the AIADMK, won four seats, re-entering the Assembly after two decades. At the time, it was accused of appropriating a local god for political ends.

In 2024, the ruling DMK played catch-up. The government organised an “international conference” on Murugan and sought to reclaim his Tamil identity. Clothed though it was in academic discourse about the literature and poetry around the god, his pre-Vedic origins and his impact on the Tamil language, it left DMK allies like the Dalit party Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi uneasy. But the conference was also intended to convey that the DMK was not anti-god as the BJP projected it, and to draw a line under the “sanatan dharma” row triggered by DMK heir Udhayanidhi Stalin.

Now, with months to go before the election, Hindutva has rolled the dice on Murugan once again, holding a “Murugan Devotees’Conference” in Madurai this past Sunday. The city is a prominent centre of Saivism, with the 13th century Madurai Meenakshi temple as its central showpiece.

For the Hindu Munnani, an organisation founded by the RSS in Tamil Nadu, and the organiser of the conference, Madurai is important for another significance. It is close to Thiruparankundram, one of Murugan’s six abodes. The temple is located on the foothills, while on the hilltop is a mosque and a dargah, dedicated to an ascetic named Sikander Badshah, who lived in the 12th century according to local legend. Over the last eight months, the hill has become a communal hot spot, with Hindu outfits claiming the dargah and mosque were polluting the temple. Protests by the Hindu Munnani other Hindu outfits triggered tensions in the area earlier this year.

As expected, the Madurai conference attracted a huge audience. Some reports said it was the Hindu right’s biggest mobilisation in the state. Though the organisers claimed it was a purely religious event, Andhra Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan and former TN BJP president K Annamalai, the star speakers, left no one in doubt about what it was with their demand for “Hindu unity” at the time of elections.

But that old Rubik’s Cube problem has surfaced — unless you crack the whole, solving one side is certain to end up scrambling the others. With leaders of the BJP ally AIADMK also in attendance at the gathering, a video presentation during the conference took swipes at the professed atheism of Dravidian leaders including its icons EVR ‘Periyar’, and the state’s first Dravidian chief minister CN Annadurai. The latter’s name is in fact the second A in AIADMK, and his face adorns the party flag. AIADMK leaders have condemned the “defamation” of the founding leaders of Dravidianism by the organisers of the conference. The BJP has defended the video as a “critique of atheism” and not a personal attack on the leaders. The controversy has sharpened the tensions inherent in the uneasy alliance between the two parties.

What the BJP is yet to comprehend is that Dravidianism has been a successful political model because it never sought to impose its rationalism on the people. Rather, it made a compact of co-existence with the religious beliefs and traditions of the people decades ago. It is not in conflict with the people, and the people are not in conflict with an ideology that talks about social justice more than its rationalism. On the other hand, a party that seeks to undermine the contributions of state icons could end up tripping on its vel.

Nirupama Subramanian is an independent journalist.

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