The north-south divide, among other things, is preventing Prime Minister Narendra Modi from aping Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to the fullest. Modi’s electoral achievements fell short of the Vindhyas and apart from Karnataka, where the BJP scored in both Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, the rest of “South India” has to date remained cut off from the Bharatiya Janata Party’s feared depredations.

The South Indian apparently has more sense than his North Indian counterpart and no less than Congress leader Rahul Gandhi voiced this alleged truism when he praised Wayanad for electing him and berated Amethi for rejecting him. Being his own man, Rahul Gandhi refused to shoulder any blame, whatsoever for his defeat at the hands of Smriti Irani.

Ironically, Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra’ will be snaking through Amethi after it cuts a path through Modi’s ‘Varanasi’ and Sonia Gandhi’s Rai Bareilly. For the Congress to revive its fortunes in north India requires Rahul Gandhi’s triumphant return to Amethi whether Minority Affairs Minister Smriti Irani likes it or not.

The idea is that by this time, at least, Amethians would have developed sense enough to vote like south Indians and return to Rahul Gandhi his family pocket-borough. But while the Congress fights its north Indian demons, the BJP has south Indian gremlins to reckon with, which have stopped the BJP from crossing into South India with solid ballast.

The fact is, the Modi reign is incomplete without the BJP running its gamut of South India. Modi has not been able to bring South India under the BJP’s control, except for Karnataka for limited periods. It is not because he hasn’t been trying. Despite numerous elections, including the 2019 general elections, which established Narendra Modi as the paramount leader of North India, South India has shunned Modi’s charisma.

This bothers the Prime Minister. It must hurt Modi that the majority of the Kerala and Tamil Nadu electorate do not see the merit in Modi that north India sees in him. They don’t seem to care two hoots for Modi. The Prime Minister is given stony welcomes. Even Telangana and Andhra Pradesh appear out of focus, with the former described as the “BJP’s gateway to the south”.

Even the vaunted “Boss” of the world title that Modi got in Australia did not cut ice with the ‘South’, which has repeatedly rejected Modi’s overtures such that now he has become a “jinx”. Above all, at this juncture when Lord Ram reigns supreme in the mind of the north Indian Hindu, the south Indian Hindu is an enigma wrapped in secular cellophane, immune to Modi-rule.

So, what does Modi do? He sees opportunity in Ram. He sees the chance to obliterate the north-south divide plaguing the BJP. And his actions up north are impacting the south. Suddenly, ‘Ram’ is everywhere –on wall-posters, on hoardings, on “flexes”… Ram is the controversy people and politicians are weighing for and against at religious settings and in political war-rooms.

Even in ‘God’s Own Country’, where atheists rule in alliance with the religiously inclined, where the BJP cannot get its hands on power, which alternates in the grips of the Congress and the Left, the most Prime Minister Narendra Modi could do was go to centrally-administered Lakshadweep and snorkel and take a walk on the beach leading to an India-Maldives "coral".

But Modi saw opportunity in Ram and he has been talking of and introducing "Ram Rajya" to the southern states, so much so, his actions down-south match those up-north. Prime Minister Narendra Modi sees promise in the entire “south” after the consecration. And he has made south Indians listen to devotional “Ram songs” in their native languages. The profiles of south Indian songsters have been dug up and Modi is releasing their "Ram Bhajans" on his ‘X’, formerly Twitter, account and on YouTube channel. The list of “Ram Dhun” includes 17 Malayalam Ram songs including one by Yesudas and another by K. S. Chitra, ‘Kerala’s own nightingale’.

The list has a total of 62 Ram songs in all languages including Bengali, Oriya, Kashmiri and Konkanese. Regional language songs number 27. The Prime Minister’s YouTube channel has the collection “Shriram Bhajan In Indian Languages” and these “Ram Bhajans” have been breaking the silence 24/7 all over the south. There is no way they’ll stop unless somebody forces a power-outage on January 22, which isn’t ruled out.

Bottom-line is, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is making a serious pitch to win over South India’s Hindu with Lord Ram. The Hindu God is being linked to the South Indian Hindu in any which possible including in the dark stone used by the South Indian sculptor. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s RSS inspired Hindutva project would be incomplete if the south was not fully assimilated with the BJP-aligned north. And if the Pran-Pratistha of Lord Ram and "Ram Bhajans" in regional south Indian languages can help, why stop at the language barrier? After all, Nehru has to be bested. (IPA Service)