After each election, there is an understandable popular desire for a simple narrative that can explain the results. Sometimes, it is possible to do so. For example, it was easy to account for the sweeping BJP victory in the 2019 national elections. But often, as political scientists dealing with multi-factor elections have always known, election results don’t lend themselves to a clear and simple narrative.

Beyond Modi’s continuing popularity in the Hindi belt, is there anything that needs to be said? Looking at the voting gaps between winners and losers immediately creates interpretive issues. Other than Madhya Pradesh, where the vote difference between the BJP and Congress was nearly 8 per cent, which is huge in a parliamentary system, the seat proportions do not reflect big voting differences. The latter is generally true in first-past-the-post systems, which India has, but its specific implications for these elections must be noted.

Essentially, Congress vote share in the three Northern states did not decline, but the BJP’s went up. The gap in Chhattisgarh is roughly 4 per cent, and in Rajasthan, a mere 2 per cent. Some tactical changes here and there could have altered the final results, especially in Rajasthan. Even in Telangana, the Congress vote is only 2 per cent ahead of the BRS, but it was the beneficiary.

Even if we agree that the results enhance Modi’s standing, the data don’t support the oft-repeated slogan, Modi hai to mumkin hai (Modi makes the impossible possible). Modi’s magic did not work in Telangana, where the BJP finished far behind the top two parties. Focusing only on Northern states and ignoring Telangana may lead us to underestimate an important narrative, which has to do with the North-South divergence in Indian politics.

Of the five states of South India, covering just a bit less than a fourth of the nation’s population, none today has a BJP government. In contrast, in the North, which has over 43 per cent of the population, not all governments may be with the BJP, but most are. If we, for argument’s sake, present Gujarat as a geographically proximate cousin of the North, the BJP’s regional domination is even greater.

The narrative of a North-South divergence came up earlier this year, too, when the BJP lost Karnataka. But before we analyse its possible future trajectory, we must first note how the idea of a BJP-embracing North and a BJP-rejecting South requires qualifications. The South is not entirely BJP-mukt. Earlier this year, the BJP did lose Karnataka, the second-largest Southern state, but it still had 36 per cent of the vote. And in Telangana recently, the BJP nearly doubled its vote share to 14 per cent. But these numbers only establish presence. Being present in the political space is not what the BJP seeks. It wants to rule more and more states. The difference between ruling and just being present is quite critical to the party’s self-understanding of its historic destiny.

The idea that Indian society has two different kinds of India, a Northern India and a Southern India, has been around for some time. It was first articulated in the Dravidian movement. But under Congress dominance, lasting decades, it was not true in the realm of electoral politics. Only in the post-Emergency 1977 elections, unusual in all respects, did the results reflect a radical divergence between the North and South. Indira Gandhi lost the North, but won the South. In the end, it meant that she lost the national election. Southern numbers simply can’t match those from the North.

Why has the South escaped the BJP’s electoral juggernaut? Part of the answer is historical-cum-ideological. Hindu nationalism, the BJP’s avowed ideology, cannot break its link with its anti-Muslim core. Development and governance alone do not provide enough political sustenance. Without antagonism towards Muslims for the “historical wrongs” committed by Muslim rulers in India’s past and the idea of “Muslim infidelity” to India, the BJP won’t be what it is. Its ideology is best described today as roads and welfare goods, plus anti-Muslim hostility.

The Hindu nationalist argument can resonate only in those parts of South India where Muslim princes ruled and discrimination against the Hindu subjects under their rule can be shown to exist. Mysore princes of the 18th century, Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, and Hyderabad’s Nizams, especially the seventh (1911-48), can be cited as Southern illustrations of what the Mughals did up North. This is not wholly straightforward, as regional histories are complex. Professional historians are unable to equate Tipu Sultan with Aurangzeb, and they also show how the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad was more interested in dynastic rule than in Muslim rule. But the Razakars, a rabidly violent anti-Hindu group, did become the Nizam’s stormtroopers in the last decade of his rule (1938-48).

There are, thus, enough historical fragments available to keep Hindu nationalists ideologically interested in Telangana (as well as Karnataka). But there is no such historical charge in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra. Hindu nationalism falls flat there. Since the South is more developed than the North and has had a history of welfare politics for the subaltern, the narrative of roads and cooking gas also does not excite popular enthusiasm.

A second feature of Hindu nationalism — its preoccupation with Hindi — also obstructs the BJP’s Southern march. To be sure, as scholars of Hindu nationalism have shown, the RSS gave up its insistence on Hindi as the sole national language in the 1980s. Its schools for children started teaching in the regional vernacular. Otherwise, the RSS could not have expanded to Southern (and Eastern) India.

Still, glorification of Hindi — to the extent of seeking to impose it on non-Hindi lands — is a default instinct, if not the official gospel, of Hindu nationalism. Charges of Hindi imperialism are easy to notice in Southern intellectual circles. Political parties have also often articulated the grievance explicitly. Southerners are proud of their language and heritage, and justly so. They like their Indian identity, but it is different from the North. Hindi-Hindu nationalism imposes troubling cultural uniformity.

The BJP can be in power again in Delhi without Southern support. That is implied in the cold logic of numbers. A new delimitation can make it even more likely. But can the BJP afford to ignore legitimate Southern complaints? This question has a haunting quality.

The writer is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute