Southern India, poll pundits argue, is the Bharatiya Janata Party’s final frontier. The BJP, unsurprisingly, would reject their argument. It would cite the party’s electoral triumphs in Karnataka — even though foul means have been employed to win the crown — or its improved showing in Telangana as evidence of the BJP’s southern reach. But it is undeniable that the kind of political dominance that the BJP has had in northern India has eluded it in the provinces south of the Vindhyas. The BJP’s political kitty in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh is not even modest. It has also lost power in Karnataka. There are now whispers that the prime minister — he is on a visit to Tamil Nadu and Lakshadweep — wants to turn things around. Apparently, Narendra Modi might contest the general elections from a southern seat — possibly Ramanathapuram — apart from Varanasi. If that does come to pass, measures like the Kashi Tamil Sangamam as well as Mr Modi’s antics with the sengol during the inauguration of the new Parliament would fall into place. The BJP would be hoping that the South would respond positively to Mr Modi, if not the party, thereby pushing up the BJP’s Lok Sabha tally even further.

But breaching the southern fortress would be challenging even for Mr Modi. This is on account of a combination of social, linguistic and cultural factors. In spite of the rapid expansion of the BJP’s electoral imprint, it is still viewed — rightly or wrongly — as a party dominated by upper castes. This legacy could prove to be a burden in Tamil Nadu — the state Mr Modi is said to be eyeing the most — which has a strong and robust history of mobilisation of communities that found themselves at the lower rungs of the oppressive caste pyramid. Then, there is the issue of language. The BJP’s repeated attempts to impose Hindi on a multilingual polity have been fiercely resisted by the southern states. A line of thought even suggests that the South’s frigid embrace of the BJP could be attributed to the fact that while Hinduism has always been marked by the ethics of devotion and confidence, Hindutva as a political project is fuelled by the kind of chauvinism, paranoia and majoritarianism that a cultured, literate, pluralist South finds unacceptable. These hypotheses remain in the realm of conjecture and need to be tested against realities. For that, Mr Modi would have to take a dip in the South’s electoral waters.