BJP wooing backward community in northern Tamil Nadu ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha polls

June 23 (AZINS) Ahead of the next year’s Lok Sabha polls, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is trying to woo the dominant Vanniyar community in Northern Tamil Nadu through a conference in Chennai on July 7.

The conference, titled “Mandhira Maalai Thamarai”, is being organised by G Raviraj, a former PMK MLA, to air the long-pending demand for a separate quota for Vanniyars within the 20% reservation for the most backward communities in Tamil Nadu and 2% reservation in the central quota.

“The Vanniyars will rally behind the BJP if our long pending demands are fulfilled. Vanniyar will not back PMK leader, Dr S Ramadoss, as he has forgotten the demands after getting MP and MLAs seats,” Raviraj told DNA.

He said more than 50,000 people would attend the conference which is likely to be presided over by BJP president Amit Shah and Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

BJP has been trying to create its own foothold in Tamil Nadu where politics is dominated by the AIADMK and the DMK for over 50 years. With the demise of the AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa and ailing DMK chief M Karunanidhi, BJP sees an opportunity to expand its base by wooing leaders from major backward communities including Gounders, Thevars and Vanniyars in the state.

The numerically strong Vanniyar community is spread across the Northern districts in 12 Lok Sabha constituencies where the BJP has performed poorly in the past elections. BJP leaders said that the conference would help the party reach out to the Vanniyar community.

The BJP on May 27 held an SC/ST conference in Villupuram in North Tamil Nadu to shed its upper caste party tag. In fact, the BJP tried to woo Devendrakula Vellalars, a Scheduled Caste community, in Southern Tamil Nadu when Amit Shah attended a conference in 2015 in Madurai backing their demand for exclusion from the SC list. However, the BJP leaders, who were hoping to win the community's votes in the 2016 assembly polls, failed miserably.

BJP state general secretary Vanathi Srinivasan denied the charge that her party was doing caste politics in the state. “We are trying to reach out to different communities through different conferences by hearing the demands and promising to fulfil it,” she said. When asked whether her party was targetting their former ally PMK’s Vanniyar vote bank, she said it was only aimed at strengthening the party in Northern districts.

Writer and political commentator Stalin Rajangam said that BJP wanted to replicate its successful caste-based political mobilisation model, experimented in Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka, in Tamil Nadu. “BJP believes that they would be able to consolidate votes base of different communities by addressing their demands individually. We don’t know whether such a model will work in Tamil Nadu,” he said.

In western Tamil Nadu, BJP made inroads in Coimbatore and Tirupur districts after the 1998 blast incident. Kongunadu Jananayaka Katchi (KJK), the Gounders-based fledging political party, merged with the BJP in September last year.

Senior BJP leader and Minister of State for Finance Pon Radhakrishnan is the lone MP from the state who won from Kanyakumari Constituency. Already enjoying a strong support among Nadar community, the party wants to bring in the numerically strong Thevar community votes in the Southern districts.

Former AIADMK Minister Nainar Nagendran from Tuticorin district in south Tamil Nadu, who belongs to Thevar community, joined the BJP last year.