The Bharatiya Janata Party has made some unprecedented gains in Tamil Nadu, thanks to the alliance it struck with Jayalalitha's All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam - a party on whose name the word Dravida is nothing but an appendage, stripped of all its Tamil nationalist connotations.All non-Congress parties in Tamil Nadu which carry the word "Dravida" have for long given up the old Periyar brand of separatist nationalism and have limited themselves to occasional bursts of ethnic-cultural assertion. It is in this context that Karunanidhi's invocation of "Tamil pride" in the wake of the Jain Commission Report did not go down well with the electorate. Tamils as a society have lost almost all their Dravida moorings.However, over the years, in the wake of the organised assertion of Hindu nationalism, the Tamils too have succumbed to the spirit of the times. The result: a party like the BJP is today perceived as electable by the Tamils. Ten years ago, in Madras, one could not have had slogans likeOrey naadu, orey makkal, orey kalacharam (one nation, one people, one culture).The outcome in Tamil Nadu, therefore, is a watershed verdict. All this, of course, only if we are willing to look at the Tamil Nadu verdict as something more than the result of an anti-incumbency factor, or what is more easier, explain it simply in terms of the series of bomb blasts in Coimbatore and sporadic ones in Chennai. Not that one is trying to underplay the importance of the bomb blasts and the "law and order" angle.What does a right-wing Hindi-Hindu party at the Centre mean to the Tamils in the long run? Even today Tamil Nadu is the only state where Hindi news on the national television and radio networks cannot be heard before the English news. While the Hindi version appears in all the other states of the country, in Tamil Nadu the network goes blank for a few seconds and what follows is announcements in Tamil read out in a matter-of-fact manner. But will this be the case, say, five years from now, when,perhaps, the BJP may on its own terms gain more legitimacy?Such cultural issues seem to emerge as problematic only in the light of one dominant notion of religion, nationalism and politics being imposed on other sections of what indeed is a pluralistic country.Similar problems seem to come up when we think of the BJP and the Northeast, where a G. G. Swell, who till recently opposed the BJP because of its views on cow-slaughter among other things, has after the election results become a part of it. In the Northeast, where the BJP has wooed almost all the non-Congress MPs, the party has made significant gains also on its own, one learns, because of its promise to rethink its stance of banning cow-slaughter, especially in the wake of the resistance to this idea from a people whose day-to-day diet is heavily dependent on beef.This shows that the forces of Hindutva have had to change tack to gain some legitimacy in areas which have by the very nature of their history, culture and ethos been outside thepurview of Hindu nationalism. It is for this very reason that even the RSS had had to carry its work in Tamil Nadu as the "Hindu Munnani" rather than under its own banner. The very name Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh would not be acceptable to the non-Brahmin masses of Tamil Nadu. The Hindu Munnani offers us a telling case of the irony of the Hindu-Hindi RSS translating itself into something that makes sense to the "Tamil Hindu".In an era when Hindu nationalism is the only and true nationalism, any talk of harking back to Dravidian ideas would, of course, be tantamount to committing "treason". But, we will be told, the Tamils themselves have approved of this idea. They have lent their own voice to such a move in this election. It is not just a slap on the mobilisation that took place along the lines of Dravidian identity. It is a blow to the very history of Tamils (from the Sangam period down) who had the inherent wherewithal to resist the Hindutvaisation over centuries.
