The Flow of Thirukkural

Dravidianism developed as a challenge against the Aryan-supremacist and Hindu nationalist trends of India's early nationalist movement. It continues to challenge Hindutva's Vedic supremacist concepts

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

IN 2025, Kuppusamy Annamalai, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Tamil Nadu unit president, was compelled to relinquish his post for his relentless criticism of Dravidian political stalwarts.

Coming exactly a century after Erode Venkata Ramasamy, better known as ‘Periyar’, launched the Self-Respect movement that laid the foundation of Dravidian politics, the development reflected the dominance that Dravidian political ideology still holds over the southern state.

The BJP’s Hindu identity politics is an ideological rival of radically secular and rationalist Dravidian identity politics. However, the widespread belief in political circles was that his party had to ‘sacrifice’ him for the sake of forging an alliance with the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the principal opposition of the state’s ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government.

In 2023, the regional party had walked out of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), blaming the BJP state leadership—Annamalai in particular—for “making unnecessary remarks about our former leaders for the past year”. After all, AIADMK may practise Dravidian politics in a much more diluted form than the DMK, but it still claims the legacy of Dravidian ideology. And Annamalai had targeted the late Dravidian ideologue, Conjeevaram Natarajan Annadurai, after whom the party is named.

The AIADMK’s snapping of ties in 2023 came shortly after Annamalai attacked a core AIADMK legacy, alleging that at a 1956 Madurai event, freedom fighter and Forward Bloc leader Muthuramalingam Thevar had sharply criticised Annadurai and PT Rajan for insulting Hindu gods during a temple speech.