By naming a sworn swayamsevak for vice president, the Modi-Shah duo have sent out a clear and positive message to Nagpur, where the RSS headquarters is located, explains N Sathiya Moorthy.
By naming 68-year-old Maharashtra Governor C P Radhakrishnan -- CPR for short --- as the Bharatiya Janata Party-National Democratic Alliance's vice presidential candidate for the vacancy caused by Jagdeep Dhankar's abrupt resignation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sought to kill many birds with a single shot.
While CPR's victory is sealed given the NDA's massive margin in the Electoral College, comprising members of the two Houses of Parliament -- the Opposition INDIA combine has promised to field a candidate -- the coincidental restoration of the North-South equilibrium in the choice of President and Vice President, after the retirement of M Venkaiah Naidu (2017-22) cannot be gainsaid.
Of course, it is more in form than content, where it is all politics, both inter- and intra- for Modi and BJP, not necessarily in that order.
Of course, by nominating the suave and unassuming CPR for Vice President after predecessor Dhankar had rocked the Rajya Sabha as ex officio Chairman, Modi has sent out a message that he was not offering only periodic lip-service to Tamil and Tamil culture.
Modi has now shown that his quoting ancient literary lines like Yaadum Oore, Yavarum Kelir in international fora, visiting Chola cultural sites like Gangaikonda Cholapuram temple, and recreating the Chola sceptre for placement in the new Parliament complex at inauguration, had more than symbolism in them.
Yet, in a ground situation where pan-Tamil sentiments, including those on Hindi, NEET and larger issues of Centre-State relations, have consolidated, it remains to be seen if CPR's nomination may have come a little late in the day. Yet, Modi-BJP's game-plan is clear.
The first and foremost, by elevating a Tamil to the second highest Constitutional office in the country, the BJP has taunted the ruling DMK leader of the INDIA combine in the run-up to Tamil Nadu assembly elections, due in March-April next.
The DMK that is back to wearing its Tamil identity and Dravidian ideology on its sleeve, now under Chief Minister M K Stalin, has to either back CPR in the vice presidential election and rock the fragile unity in the Opposition at the national level, or face criticism from the rival AIADMK-led BJP-NDA for putting political interests over the larger Tamil identity and cause.
Memories of the united Andhra Pradesh's then chief minister N T Rama Rao, his famous one-liner, 'Telugu atma gowravam' over party and then United Front interests at the national level in backing then prime minister P V Narasimha Rao when he contested the Medak Lok Sabha seat after assuming office in 1991, will be freely recalled.
Even more, rivals would not spare the DMK by claiming how the late party patriarch and Stalin's father M Karunanidhi torpedoed the chances of electoral ally G K Moopanar, a fellow Tamil, becoming prime minister in 1996.
The alternative for Stalin to avoid such mud-slinging would be for him to talk the Congress leadership and other partners in the INDIA combine at the national level, out of fielding a candidate, and cause CPR's unanimous choice, a rarity these days.
If anything, Stalin is not expected to touch any such proposal with a barge pole, but if he still does it even if for argument's sake, then he would have stolen Modi's thunder.
The reasons are not far to seek. Without it, Stalin and the DMK would have nothing much to lose as their votes are not going to be the clincher in the vice presidential election, and talks of their betraying a fellow Tamil would die its natural death, long before the assembly polls. Or, that would be the DMK's calculation.
For starters, while announcing CPR's candidacy, BJP national President J P Nadda said they would be talking to the Opposition parties for a unanimous election. Whether intended or not, such a course could trap the DMK in an avoidable image clash.
How it gets out of it all will be carefully watched by the Hindutva-sensitive voters of Tamil Nadu. Needless to point out that the DMK, as if to provoke the BJP-AIADMK combine, will ask/appeal to CPR, to use his good offices to get all that is due for the Centre, especially in terms of shared funds, which have been withheld for no justifiable reason. It could be equally embarrassing.
For the uninitiated, Chandrapuram Ponnusamy Radhakrishnan comes from Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu's western Gounder belt, where his community, Vellala Gounder, has a strong presence in every way. The community should get the credit of making Tiruppur the hosiery capital of the world with little or no help from governments, whether at the Centre or in the state.
Otherwise a rich farming community still, the Gounders are also identified as the champions of making what is better known as the Coimbatore belt, the business capital of Tamil Nadu, until economic reforms stole the title back for Madras, now Chennai, the state capital.
The community is there everywhere in the western belt, beginning with the textile industry, then electric mores and spares, and white goods manufacture. Before China stole the thunder, below-the-radar units in the Coimbatore belt manufactured mixies and grinders for the Indian/south Indian kitchen, and other household appliances that carried the names of well-known brands.
Born into such a background and with a BBA degree to his credit, young CPR began associating with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh at the impressionable age of 17 and became a state committee member of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the pre-Emergency precursor to the present-day BJP. To the present day, he remains a staunch swayamsevak, though unlike many others, he does not (have to) wear his credentials on the sleeve.
In a way, it is his long-term RSS connections, non-controversial nature and quiet presence even in a crowd, which attracted Team Modi, to make him first the governor of Jharkhand (2023-2024), and later Maharashtra, since 2024, whose capital city Mumbai is also known as the business capital of India.
To the extent, by naming a sworn swayamsevak for vice president, the Modi-Shah duo at the BJP's top-most politico-administrative structure have sent out a clear and positive message to Nagpur, where the RSS headquarters is located.
According to reports, the strains between the BJP and RSS had begun showing at least to the inner-most circles, with the RSS leadership more concerned about the unasked question, 'Who after Modi?' and 'What after Modi?'
Of course, the cause for the question was provided by the BJP-NDA's results in last year's Lok Sabha elections. The BJP under Modi, having swept the tables near-clean in 2014 and 2019, struggled to manage 240 seats, 33 short of the cut-off figure of 272 in the 543-member Lok Sabha.
The RSS' concerns are born out of its ideological approach to politics, unsure as it is to the future of Hindutva if the BJP failed to come back to power at the Centre in 2029. They are even more clear that by sitting as lame-ducks when Modi swept the shelves clean of BJP veterans, starting with L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, in his early days as prime inister, they are now left with little choice, option or alternative, to carry what they otherwise agree as the 'Modi fire', forward.
In this background, it is anybody's guess if Modi's symbolic signals to the RSS leadership through the choice of a swayamsevak in CPR as Vice-President would suffice, in mollifying Nagpur or addressing the latter's larger concerns -- which are real, from their collective perspective. But that is beside the point just now.
In announcing CPR's choice, Nadda made a specific mention of how their candidate was 'acceptable to all sections of the people in Tamil Nadu'. Modi could not have put it better when he recalled Radhakrishnan's 'dedication, humility and intellect'. For an ideologically committed swayamsevak from a young age, he had friends in every political party, cutting across party-lines and socio-political ideologies.
Thus, CPR was known to have access to the DMK's Karunanidhi, though only after the late L Ganesan, who was until recently the governor of Nagaland and who died last week after suffering a serious head injury owing to a slip-and-fall incident in his Chennai home. But CPR did not compromise ideology or party policies in such interactions.
If, however, CPR did not become as close to the AIADMK's Jayalalithaa, it did not owe to any animosity. Jaya, instead, preferred communicating with the BJP national leadership through one-time school-mate Sukumar Nambiar, son of yesteryear Tamil actor M N Nambiar. After Sukumar's sudden and untimely death, the BJP could never really develop a personal rapport with the AIADMK leadership.
If anything, the BJP's ties with the AIADMK under former chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami was antagonistic under a CPR successor, K Annamalai. But even under incumbent Nainar Nagendran, a former Jaya-era minister in the AIADMK, they are formal, neither warm, nor personal.
In this background, CPR can at best bring the weight of the vice presidency, to domestic politics in native Tamil Nadu, but beyond a point, the new position he could hold would be restrictive, thanks to protocol and procedural matters. Even without it, CPR is seen as having lost touch with state politics after a term as Tamil Nadu BJP president (2003-2006).
Despite his RSS allegiance and past, he could not tame fellow swayamsevaks, who were better entrenched and formed a clique within the state party. His weak and half-hearted attempts to retrieve the lost position and prestige did not succeed in later years. Instead, in the Modi era, all that the leadership could do for CPR was to pull him out of the quagmire of state BJP and name him Jharkhand Governor.
Though CPR has begun visiting his native state more frequently in recent months, unlike the likes of one-time state party president, Tamizhisai Soundararajan when she was Telangana Governor, and more like the late L Ganesan as the tenant of the Nagaland Raj Bhavan, he has been careful in his criticism of the ruling DMK rival of the BJP, even on ideological matters.
CPR never crossed the invisible red lines for a governor from another state, on Tamil soil, despite his own Tamil roots. He was even less involved in the state BJP's faction-ridden politics, with the result, his visits to his native state seldom got reported, not certainly in adversarial terms.
The same applies also to Radhakrishnan's parliamentary career. He tasted victory in his first electoral outing in 1998, at the height of the Coimbatore serial blasts, which targeted then BJP president Advani. He won the Coimbatore seat comfortably, yes, and was only one of the five BJP-NDA candidates under Jaya's AIADMK, to win by a lakh-and-more vote margin. The MDMK's Vaiko (Sivakasi) and one-time Congress veteran Vazhappadi K Ramamurthy (Tiruchengode) were among the rest.
A year later when he won the same seat after the BJP aligned with the ruling DMK for Elections-1999, CPR's victory margin against CPI veteran, R Nallakannu, was drastically reduced by less than half the previous one. In 2004, CPR lost the seat to the CPI partner in the rival DMK-led UPA alliance, by a huge margin -- never to return to electoral politics afterwards.
A possible five-year term as vice president is the best thing that could have happened to CPR personally after a long drought in BJP politics, relieved to an extent by gubernatorial positions in the past couple of years.
However, his political mobility within the state BJP, particularly the native western belt might have been stifled by the domineering presence of Annamalai, whose image still hangs in the backdrop as a formidable challenge to the local BJP and AIADMK stalwarts from the past.
If the idea of the BJP leadership was to use Radhakrishnan's new-found status to check Annamalai on the track, or use his suave approach to win back old friends in the state BJP that too could become a far-cry. If anything, CPR's elevation now may have stolen the thunder of fellow Coimbatorean, Vanathi Srinivasan.
A fellow Gounder like Annamalai, also from the western belt, Vanathi, a first-time MLA who defeated actor-politician Kamalahassan in Elections 2021, is also the national president of the BJP women's wing. Hers was one of the three names doing the rounds as a possible replacement for Nadda as national party president, if the leadership decides to promote a woman candidate.
Now, Vanathi, in all probability, can forget the possibility even if the leadership revives talks of a woman as national president. So much for CPR's elevation in national politics and Constitutional structure, as far as the BJP's faction-ridden TN politics goes.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.
Photographs curated by Anant Salvi/Rediff
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