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If the DMK is able to sustain the momentum until the assembly polls, the AIADMK especially and the PMK and possibly the infant TVK too would find it hard to sign up with the BJP, explains N Sathiya Moorthy.
If someone thought that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre would wisely use governance issues, including perceptions of corruption and lawlessness, against the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam counterpart in Tamil Nadu in the assembly polls next year, it is not to be.
Instead, the party has seemingly handed over to the victorious Dravidian major from three past elections in a row, 'Tamil pride' on a platter as a key poll issue for next year.
A lot will remain on the sustainability of this or any other issue so much later, in a poll in which existing adversaries like the Opposition All India Anna DMK and new entrant Tamizhaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK) of actor-politician Vijay hope to make a mark.
Though multi-layered otherwise like the BJP's Hindutva agenda, where religion and national pride of a different breed have been jostling for equitable if not equal space, Tamil pride too just now has at least two major components.
One derives from allegations of 'Hindi imposition' by the BJP-led Centre and the other purportedly flows from the delimitation story, both of which have suddenly captured the nation's imagination as Deputy Chief Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin's remarks on Sanatana Dharma had done two years ago.
One, the Hindi card was gifted by the BJP, like the rival Congress when it was in power at the Centre in the 1960s and later, while the delimitation issue seems to be an overnight product but not exactly so.
Suffice to point out, between them, the two issues have adequately agitated the new-generation Tamil youth as only the apolitical and self-motivated 'Jallikattu protests' had done in January 2017.
No marks for guessing the possible electoral beneficiary -- unless, of course, the AIADMIK and the TVK between them decide not to have a tie-up with the BJP for the assembly polls as the former had done in 2024 and the latter did not as it was still-born.
Like 'Hindi imposition', Tamil Nadu has a long tryst with delimitation as a socio-political issue.
If in 1971, Parliament unanimously decided to extend seat reservations favouring the SC-ST communities for a 30-year period, if only to help them climb up the socio-economic ladder, in 2001, the ruling BJP took the initiative to grant a further extension, under pressure from its TN allies, comprising the DMK, Marumalarchi DMK and the Pattali Makkal Katchi.
The crux of the Dravidian argument was that delimitation, if undertaken on the basis of the latest population figures, would bring down the number of Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu to 31 from the existing 39.
Neighbouring Kerala too had complained that theirs would go down from 20 to 15.
Other South Indian states too had similar complaints.
They all claimed that they were being penalised for the successful implementation of population control measures that has brought down their net birth ratio.
Even more so, all these states, cutting across party lines, complained that any fresh delimitation at the time would also reward states (especially those in the north-central region) for their failure to implement population control measures as effectively.
Tamil Nadu's DMK Chief Minister M K Stalin flagged the issue almost overnight, even as the state was caught in an earlier spiral centred on fresh allegations of 'Hindi imposition'.
Rather than subduing the other, the new cause ended up making it a double-barrel gun, with Stalin calling an all-party meeting on March 5 and appealing to all invitees not to make a prestige issue of the same and stand united.
For all the heat and dust that it had created in the past fortnight, the all-party meeting itself was a relatively peaceful affair, after the BJP, the party's forgettable TMC ally founded by the late G K Moopanar and controversial pan-Tamil actor-politician Seeman's NTK decided to stay away.
The resolution moved by Chief Minister Stalin stopped with appealing to the Centre to defer delimitation by another 30 years as in the past, but not without reason.
Clearly, the DMK's think-tank had read through the National Population Policy-2000, which had set a 2045 deadline for the stabilisation of population growth across the country.
This implied that any fresh attempts at delimitation only then and not any time before would be meaningful.
What the DMK leaders did not say is the anticipated outcome of the next edition of the NPP that would have to await the next Census and would also be indicative of the success/failure rate of individual states in working towards the 2045 deadline.
The outcomes of the meet apart, if the DMK is able to sustain the momentum until the assembly polls, the AIADMK especially and the PMK to a greater or lesser extent and possibly the infant TVK too would find it hard to sign up with the BJP.
Opinion is yet divided in the AIADMK especially about shaking hands again with the BJP as cadres blame Narendra Modi's pronounced Hindutva agenda elsewhere in the country as the cause for the alliance losing two elections in a row in 2019 and 2021 in Tamil Nadu.
The same argument does not hold good for the third round of elections, this one to the Lok Sabha as in 2024, after the AIADMK broke ties with the BJP and yet both lost miserably, one more time.
The fact also remains that the AIADMK second line and cadres are increasingly convinced that party boss and former chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami lacks the public appeal of party founder M G Ramachandran and even more popular successor Jayalalithaa to charm women voters in particular.
They too want an ally, but desire it not to be the BJP if they could help.
The social impact and the politics attached to it are as simple and/or complicated as the other, and hence also the multiple voices that are being heard across the political spectrum and even from outside.
The BJP could have simply criticised the DMK for denying Tamil youth the opportunity to learn another language and thus seeking employment outside the state, and hoped that at least some of it stuck.
However, that was not to be the case.
After the Centre had linked the denial of education-related funding to Tamil Nadu, totalling over Rs 2,200 crores (Rs 22 billion) to the non-implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) that insisted on inclusion of a 'three-language formula', 'Hindi imposition' revived as a dusted and tried out socio-political issue with possible electoral implications.
By stating as much, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan became the villain of the piece across Tamil Nadu.
Local BJP leaders who were critical of the state's insistence on the two-language formula (Tamil and English) were not exactly defending either the NEP or Minister Pradhan.
In doing so, they focussed excessively on the ruling DMK, forgetting that like the latter-day delimitation issue, 'Hindi imposition' has had a life of its own in the Dravidian state and every political party and social group was convinced about the legitimacy and legality of their position.
So inadequate has also been Delhi's knowledge of the 'anti-Hindi' protests that even veteran politicians and leading media personalities invariably fix its original date in the mid-1960s whereas it was actually in the mid-1930s.
Long before then prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri revived the forgotten case for Hindi to be made the 'sole official language of the Union', if only to go to the people over head of the entrenched syndicate leadership of the ruling Congress party, Rajaji (C R Rajagopalachari) as the short-lived party premier in the undivided Madras Presidency under the British Raj had introduced 'compulsory Hindi-learning' in 1937.
Like everything 'Dravidian', 'Periyar' E V Ramaswami Naicker was involved in the anti-Hindi agitation at the time and was imprisoned in Bellary, now in Karnataka, until Rajaji quit along with other Congress premiers in 1939, over the Raj involving India in the Second World War without consultations.
It is also a fact that unlike often believed, the undivided DMK's anti-Hindi agitation of 1965 alone was the main cause for the party coming to power in elections-1967, throwing out the ruling Congress that had been entrenched in the seat of power since the pre-Independence days of 1946.
It owed even more to the immediacy of rice shortage and black-marketing which the DMK managed to hold up as a product of the ruling party's collusion and corruption.
Yet, today, when Hindi-imposition is in the news, Chief Minister Stalin has responded to pro-BJP voices by saying that Tamil Nadu was not against Hindi or any other language but only against its 'imposition', often subtly and through subterfuge.
The merits of the Dravidian arguments on both issues apart, they have caught the imagination of the local population unlike any other.
For instance, a social media argument goes that unlike the previous generation that might have travelled across the Vindhyas for a living, today's Tamil youth go overseas, instead, based on their better educational qualification and knowledge of English.
Anyway, as they point out, one picks up a new language on the streets, whenever they are employed in an unfamiliar environment, and not in class rooms.
As the DMK and a few other non-DMK Dravidian leaders are not tired of pointing out, for the past decade and more, it is the Hindi-speaking north Indians who have been seeking out Tamil Nadu for jobs -- whether in the low-end of the service sector or high-paying IT and management jobs.
Such a construct and belief, which are not wholly untrue, have only fed the 'Tamil pride' to the point of being uncompromising on matters such as delimitation and Hindi imposition, the nineties kids and those born later having picked up their first lessons on the subject from the 'Jallikattu protests' -- though none is talking about it anymore, in private or public.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com