Tamil Nadu politics remains incomplete without the mention of the Dravidian ideology that basically dominates politics in the state. DMK and AIADMK, the two Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu have been robustly retaining power in the state, siding even the national parties like BJP and Congress.
The Dravidian movement that emerged from the ethos of Tamil culture, valour and languages seems like it’s nowhere to go, in fact, is here to stay. Dravidian politics in the state is quite deep-rooted as it also marked an end to the rule of Congress in the state (then known as Madras) in 1967. There have been social experiments carried out that concluded in Tamil Nadu youth saying that even if they don’t know anything about elections, they would cast their votes to parties with a Dravidian base only. A section in the youth of Tamil Nadu said that they would vote for “non-imposition of Hindi”, “non-brahminical set-up” and “secularism”.
Polling for assembly elections in the state of Tamil Nadu is currently underway, and, it only gets more crucial after the death of AIADMK face J Jayalalithaa and DMK chief M Karunanidhi as the political battle between DMK and AIADMK is now going to determine the contours of Dravidian politics in the state.
Debates over Dravidian politics in Tamil Nadu keep surfacing time and again. In one such instance, DMK chief MK-Stalin said to Amit Shah that Tamil Nadu was not a North Indian state, and, he went on to say that Amit Shah was angry because Dravidians were the race that had come to uproot the Aryans. In response to this, BJP said that the whole Dravidian-Aryan divide was a myth and DMK used it in favour of its dynastic politics.
The offshoot of DMK, AIADMK has forged an alliance led by TN Chief Minister Edapaddi K Palaniswami with BJP against the DMK-Congress alliance that swept 38 out of 39 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Today’s battle will not just decide the ruler of Tamil Nadu for the next 5-years but will also clarify what exactly the people of Tamil Nadu are rooting for.
