RSB

THE MAN WHO SAW TOMORROW Tamil Nadu is the toughest puzzle to solve for any national party in India. Ask the Congress party. It was in power for 20 years since independence. And then one fine day the state was lost to Dravidian parties. It’s been 57 years since, and the Congress is nowhere among the frontrunners. The Communists have tasted success in Kerala. But they’ve always been a sidekick in TN; never the lead player. Which brings us to the BJP. The BJP took almost 50 years to conquer the Hindi belt. The top leadership knows that the South will take a few more decades. And Tamil Nadu being the hardest nut to crack, the Sangh parivaar is willing to wait. And wait. And wait. The preparation for the harvest was started in the late sixties. Some green shoots were realised in the nineties. But the real confidence to breach Fort St. George was realised in 2019 after BJP became the largest political party in the world. The original plan was to create a nationalist front by riding a horse called Rajinikant. But the superstar developed cold feet possibly due to ill-health. So, the BJP had no other choice to create its own hero. BL Santhosh, the national general secretary of BJP, played the biggest ace of his career by punting on a man called Kuppuswamy Annamalai. K. Annamalai is the very antithesis of Tamil politicians. He’s super well educated, for starters. An IIM-L grad and ex-IPS to boot, he’s more prepared than Chat GPT to answer any question dart thrown at him by anyone. Having been mandated to disrupt state politics, Annamalai decided to do a deep dive of all things Dravidian. The learnings came thick and fast: A) Tamil Nadu is more about larger-than-life leaders than parties. It’s important for BJP to project one leader than a group of leaders. B) What keeps Dravidian parties going is the ecosystem of Movies, Media, and Literature. A parallel ecosystem needs to be created to take the Dravidians on. C) Tamils aren’t too hung up about Dravidianism. All they want is the Tamil culture to take the pride of place. D) Hindi the language is not resented. But Hindi-domination is. E) Modi was a hate figure largely due to the Dravidian campaign. This perception can be reversed as it’s merely a perception F) Tamils love bold leaders. Jayalalitha was always preferred over Karunanidhi for this reason. There’s no space for a Mr. Nice in state politics. G) While the lead parties might profess atheism, the state is by and large teeming with believers. Maybe a play can be made to tap into the spiritual side of the state. H) AIADMK minus Jayalalitha can never come to power by themselves. And AIADMK + DMK vote share is only 70%. The other 30% is available for BJP if they make an aggressive pitch. I) The opposition parties in Tamil Nadu have a cosy arrangement with the ruling party. They have a ‘Zero attacks for 4.5 years’ policy. The average opposition leader will stir out of his home only 6 months before elections J) Politicians across the board have skeletons in their closet. No one is seen as ‘clean and honest’ by the public. The thing that sets Annamalai apart from others was the fact that he weaponised his learnings. The first thing he did was to unabashedly project himself. A war room was set up to make him the most talked about BJP politician on social media. This obviously got the goat of many of his colleagues. But he managed the national leadership’s backing and thus was born the Cult of Annamalai. Having overcome competition from within, Annamalai set his sights on the larger prize. Can BJP become the No.2 party by 2024? And the No.1 party by 2026? For Mission 1 to succeed he had to turn AIADMK into an adversary. Hence his aggression vis-à-vis the party of two leaves. Once he got AIADMK out of the way, he unfolded his Brahmastra – the En Mann En Makkal - a 1770 Km padayatra that traverses every constituency in the state. No one in Tamil Nadu had attempted anything on this scale. By exercising this walkathon option, Annamalai was striving to make history. Fortunately, he got the backing of the BIG 2 when he repackaged the yatra as a platform to promote the Modi story. Amit Shah came for the inauguration. Modi, for the grand finale which attracted over 5 lakh people. BJP watchers in all Television channels have acknowledged a significant blip in the vote share after the yatra. From all estimates, right now the party might clock anywhere between 8% and 18%. That’s the magic of Annamalai. For a party that in the best of times got around 5%, this is the great leap forward. To best the AIADMK in the Lok Sabha polls will be the stuff that dreams are made of. To beat the DMK will be even sweeter. Annamalai knows Mission 1 is a realisable dream. Mission 2 should happen by 2026. In his mind, there’s no doubt about that. And that’s why, everyone loves Annamalai.