Saffron's Southern Paradox

DMK aims arrows at BJP's 'love-hate' relation with TN

- By Kavitha Muralidharan

AS INDIA'S POLITY NAVIGATES YET ANOTHER cycle of electoral rhetoric, Tamil Nadu has acquired a curious duality for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP): it is a name, an idea, an entity that's at once desired and demonised. To be more precise, Tamil Nadu is mocked outside its borders, and courted at home. This split in the saffron political imagination has not gone unnoticed within the ruling DMK, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent campaign speeches supplied fresh evidence. While the Dravidian party is his primary target, it's swooping down on remarks that have a strain of generalisation in order to poison-tip its own arrows.