Opinion As BJP's waqf gambit falls short in Kerala, the threefold conundrum it faces in the state's politics

Indian Express

02-05-2025

The BJP in Kerala stands at a crossroads. For the first time in its history, the party has secured a parliamentary seat in the state and shown noticeable growth in constituencies such as Thiruvananthapuram and Alappuzha. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP-led alliance's overall vote share rose to 19.94 per cent, marking an increase of nearly 5 percentage points since 2019. However, this progress appears limited when placed against the broader backdrop of the BJP's rise elsewhere, particularly across southern India. The party has moved well beyond the 'southern discomfort' that political scientist James Manor once described. It has governed Karnataka multiple times, carved out space within a major coalition in Tamil Nadu, and gained much greater visibility in both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, participating in alliances and winning key seats in various elections. In contrast, the BJP's gains are limited in Kerala, presenting a curious dilemma where it struggles to convert years of organisational groundwork and expanding visibility into electoral acceptance. Beneath this struggle lie some fundamental dilemmas for BJP's politics in the state.
The first is an ideological dilemma. In Kerala's bipolar political field, characterised by an amalgamation of competing class, caste and communitarian demands, the BJP has struggled to carve out a distinct ideological space. While the party and its predecessors have a long history of attempting to articulate a singular 'Hindu' politics in the state — from the formation of the Hindu Mahamandalam in 1951 to the Hindu Munnani (Hindu Front) in the 1980s and the current NDA since 2014 — its pan-Hindu electoral politics remains largely incomplete, despite recent traction. Explicit communal campaigns are not rare, including the 'love jihad' campaign and the anti-Halal campaign that took off in the state in the past few years. Yet, these have rarely had a significant electoral effect in the BJP's favour. Even the Sabarimala agitation, where many Sangh affiliates, including the BJP, were at the forefront, yielded electoral benefits largely for the Congress party, which firmly occupies the conservative position in Kerala politics, pre-empting any further-right alternative from becoming attractive.
The BJP cannot fully embrace a strident Hindutva narrative in a state where communal polarisation still seems to have limited electoral consequences. Nor has it managed to evolve a culturally rooted, localised variant of Hindutva — something akin to the 'Tamil-style Hindutva' that M S S Pandian described in Tamil Nadu. The BJP has attempted to forge a Hindutva politics suitable for Tamil Nadu since the early 2000s, reconciling Tamil pride with the larger Hindutva arguments. This ongoing project finds expressions in the performative politics of 'Tamil pride', such as a foot march invoking the quintessential Tamil god Murukan and the recent installation of a sengol (sceptre) in the new Parliament. In Kerala, however, the BJP sits very uncomfortably with the state's subnational identity. Its attempt to dismiss Kerala's exceptional human development progress is not accompanied by any parallel project to vernacularise its ideology, leaving it at odds with Kerala's political and cultural sensibilities.
A second problem the BJP faces is what could be called a minority dilemma. Kerala's unique demographic composition, with Muslims and Christians together constituting almost half the population, and Congress and the CPM's influence over upper-caste Nairs and the backward classes — including the Ezhavas and Dalits — presents a particular challenge for the BJP's social expansion. The party's primary vote share resides within a section of Hindu upper castes — despite its recent limited success with OBC votes — forcing the BJP to pursue outreach to Christian minorities. This outreach often takes the form of polarising campaigns that tap into Kerala Christians' demographic anxieties regarding Muslims. While campaigns like 'love jihad' and 'land jihad' have found some resonance among Christian churches, endorsed by church leaders and fringe Christian movements, they have not translated into significant BJP votes, as evident in the 2024 elections, where the party secured only around 5 per cent of the Christian vote.
The BJP's recent intervention in the Munambam issue, a land dispute in Ernakulam district involving over 600 families — most from the Latin Christian community — further highlights this dilemma. The dispute between these families and the Kerala State Waqf Board, centred around land ownership, became a focal point for the BJP's outreach to Christians. The party promised to resolve the issue through the Waqf (Amendment) Act. However, the promises soon proved empty. Despite initial hope among residents, the BJP failed to follow through on its commitment, admitting that the residents may still need to pursue legal remedies despite the passage of the amendment. This has reinforced the perception that the BJP's minority outreach efforts are more about optics than substantial political change. This failure to resolve the issue has underlined the limits of the BJP's minority outreach, revealing that its attempts at political inclusion, especially among Christians, remain largely performative.
A third form of dilemma, flowing from the earlier ones, is what may be called an outsider dilemma. The BJP's most notable electoral successes in Kerala have come when it has relied on candidates who stood outside its core political and organisational culture. Suresh Gopi, the actor-turned-politician who won the party its first parliamentary seat from Thrissur, kept one foot firmly outside not just the BJP's politics, but at times outside the field of party politics itself. He described his victory as part of a new trend in Kerala, where 'apolitical' voters support individual candidates rather than political parties, even as he continued to offer ritualistic nods to the BJP's central ideological commitments. A similar pattern marked the party's earlier moment of electoral traction with the candidature of E. Sreedharan, the technocrat known as the 'Metro Man'. Sreedharan, too, rarely spoke the BJP's political language. His appeal lay instead in tapping into a growing middle-class Malayali aspiration for technocratic governance and infrastructure-led modernity.
This fascination with the outsider has taken a new shape with the appointment of Rajeev Chandrasekhar as the party's state president. An entrepreneur-turned-politician, Chandrasekhar is an outsider in two important ways. First, in relation to Kerala's political field, his connection to the state had largely been limited to media ownership, particularly through his television network. Second, an outsider to the BJP's politics, as he entered Parliament as a Rajya Sabha MP from Karnataka with support from the Janata Dal (Secular) before eventually joining the BJP. As state president, Chandrasekhar has initiated a significant organisational overhaul at the district level, bringing in substantial representation for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and Christian communities. He has positioned himself in the language of technocratic development and economic investment, marking a stark departure from the style of his predecessor, K Surendran, whose leadership was framed around overt religious mobilisation. The deeper question, then, is whether the BJP begins to gain acceptance in Kerala precisely at the moment it appears less like itself. Is the state unit, under its new leadership, positioning itself as an outsider to its own ideological tradition in order to break through Kerala's electoral ceiling?
As the BJP prepares for future battles, these dilemmas sharpen. Whether the party can be both itself and electable at the same time is the larger question that now looms over its electoral future in Kerala. If the BJP continues to win by becoming less like itself, Kerala might remain its most paradoxical frontier — one where electoral gains come at the cost of ideological coherence.