No major political party in the two dominant political alliances in Tamil Nadu has given a ticket to a Brahmin candidate this season. The AIADMK, once seen by the community as a favourable platform despite its avowed allegiance to Periyar EV Ramaswami and ideals of the Dravidian Movement, has no Brahmin candidates in its list, a first in 35 years. More surprisingly, the AIADMK’s NDA ally, the BJP, too, has followed the Dravidian parties and picked nominees from non-Brahmin communities
No major political party in the two dominant political alliances in Tamil Nadu has given a ticket to a Brahmin candidate this season. The AIADMK, once seen by the community as a favourable platform despite its avowed allegiance to Periyar EV Ramaswami and ideals of the Dravidian Movement, has no Brahmin candidates in its list, a first in 35 years. More surprisingly, the AIADMK’s NDA ally, the BJP, too, has followed the Dravidian parties and picked nominees from non-Brahmin communities for its allotted 27 seats. This absence is stark because the Brahmin community has been the most voluble supporter of the BJP in the state, championing its cause at every available platform. Uncharacteristically, Vijay’s TVK and Seeman’s Naam Tamilar Katchi have picked Brahmins as candidates, even though both subscribe to the Tamil nationalist plank established by the Dravidian majors.
The pattern reveals that electoral politics in the state continues to view non-Brahminism as an essential part of social justice politics. For sure, the demography works against Brahmins: They constitute just about 3% of Tamil Nadu’s population, reside mostly in the cities, and mainly work as professionals. In recent times, the community by and large seems to have shifted allegiance to the BJP, particularly since the demise of J Jayalalithaa, a Brahmin, in 2016. With the DMK reviving the rhetoric on its Dravidian inheritance to staunch the BJP’s growth, the foundational norms of the movement have found a second wind. Periyar used anti-Brahmin sentiment to popularise ideas of social justice and representation and forced the community to go on the defensive in the political arena.
Though the Dravidian parties have turned transactional in their practice, they continue to see Periyar as their guiding light. This framework remains influential across parties, which prefer communities from numerically powerful non-Brahmin groups that negotiate hard for representation in a state where caste is coterminous with the Dravidian identity, despite the polity itself undergoing a major churn.
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