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Modi Mania in South India The BJP’s PM aspirant is popular here but cannot count on the region for numbers anil budur lulla
To shore up support in the run-up to the General Election of 2014, Modi has been making periodic visits to urban centres in the south. Yet, the region has been cold to the saffron party all these years since its 1990s emergence as a force in north and west India. Barring Karnataka, the south has been uncharted territory for the BJP, and while Modi may attract crowds, how well the party can possibly perform here remains a matter of doubt. Of the region’s 130 Lok Sabha seats—42 in Andhra Pradesh, 39 in Tamil Nadu, 28 in Karnataka and 20 in Kerala, apart from Puducherry’s sole seat—the BJP leader cannot expect a tally worth talking about. Fragmentation is the story of the south.
Take a look at the composition of the current Lok Sabha for a sense of the strength that regional parties command. To represent Tamil Nadu, the AIADMK has nine seats, the DMK 18, and the MDMK and VCK one each. From Andhra Pradesh, the TRS has two, YSR Congress two, TDP six, and the MiM one. As for Karnataka, the JD-S and KJP have one seat each (earlier, the JD-S had three but it lost two in recent bypolls). From Kerala, the Kerala Congress (Mani) faction has one, while the rest are shared among others by if size is might A huge cut-out of Modi outside the venue of a public rally in Bangalore
Aijaz Rahi/AP
visits to India’s four southern states, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi will have to look elsewhere for Lok Sabha numbers. The south is largely dominated by regional parties, and even the smaller of these are not easy for the BJP to either dislodge or forge alliances with. In Bangalore, the talking point is the Rs 10 that each attendee recently paid as an entry fee to hear Modi speak at the city’s palace grounds. At its conclusion, Karnataka’s BJP unit handed over a cheque of Rs 35 lakh to Modi to help fund his dream Sardar Patel statue project back home in Gujarat.
Despite his frequent