In his address to karyakartas on the BJP’s Foundation Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called out the Congress and other Opposition parties for “their culture of dynasty”. A few hours later, senior Congress leader A K Antony’s son, Anil Antony, was inducted into BJP at the central headquarters in Delhi. Antony is the latest in a lengthening line of scions of political families in the Congress making their way to the BJP. That the BJP turned his entry into an event only reinforced the irony.
While welcoming Anil into the party fold, the BJP leadership also stressed on his Christian identity, an aspect that, incidentally, AK Antony consistently underplayed in his own political life. The BJP leadership seems to read the party’s recent electoral success in the Northeast as evidence of its acceptance among Christians, which it hopes could be replicated in Kerala where they are over 18 per cent of the population (according to the 2011 Census).
With Hindus constituting little over 54 per cent of the state population, the BJP needs to win over sections of the minorities to crack the electoral arithmetic. It has been wooing the Christian community, which makes up about 18 per cent of the population, to build on its predominantly upper caste Hindu vote bank. However, the party has so far failed to attract any political heavyweight from the community; leaders like Alphons Kannanthanam, a bureaucrat turned MLA with CPM backing, and Tom Vadakkan, formerly known as a Gandhi family loyalist, who joined the BJP cannot be described as leaders with grass roots support.
The NDA had won a parliamentary election in Kerala, when the leader of a Kerala Congress splinter group, PC Thomas, became an MP in 2004, defeating candidates of both the Congress-led UDF and CPM-led LDF. However, Thomas, who served as a minister in the Vajpayee ministry, lost his seat when the SC in 2006 held him guilty of using religion to win votes.
The Christian community in Kerala is not a monolith. Both the RSS and the BJP have held parleys with the clergy and community leaders to impress upon them that the Sangh Parivar is not anti-Christian. Some of the denominations have responded positively to the overtures. Even though the clergy is influential among the laity, it is unclear for now if they can successfully transfer votes. That, among other things, will be a challenge for the BJP’s social engineering project in Kerala.
