Politics in Tamil Nadu remains dominated by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).
All 234 constituencies in Tamil Nadu are scheduled to go to the polls on Thursday. For at least a week, the election campaign has been overtaken by a debate over delimitation and the possible reduction of Tamil Nadu’s share of Lok Sabha seats. Although the impact of this on the election results is not yet clear, it provides a useful passage to highlight the political exceptionalism of Tamil Nadu vis-à-vis the rest of India in other respects as well. Here are four charts that indicate this.
Tamil Nadu is overwhelmingly non-upper caste
India will count castes other than Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) for the first time in the upcoming census. But we have estimates on the population of proverbial Other Backward Classes (OBC) and upper castes or shares of the non-SC-ST-OBC population from government surveys like the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS). A comparison of the latest NFHS data shows that the combined share of SC-ST-OBC population in Tamil Nadu is 97.5%, the highest among all the large states by a significant distance. Tamil Nadu continues to lead here even if we are to compare the Hindu population share SC-ST-OBC only.
The Dravidian party’s duopoly in Tamil Nadu is much stronger than the monopolies of other caste-based parties outside the state
Politics in Tamil Nadu remains dominated by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). These two regional parties are products of the larger Dravidian politics trend in the state. The combined vote share of the DMK and AIADMK in the state has never fallen below 54% since 1977, the first election contested by the AIADMK. The percentage exceeded 70% in the last two electoral cycles. The dominance of the two regional parties over the share of seats is even greater than that. It never fell below 67%, but was 96% and 85% in the last two election cycles. The Dravidian dominance of Tamil Nadu politics is much stronger than it has been for other regional party duos vying for social justice roots in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. When read with the data in the previous section, it is likely rooted in the demographic dominance of non-upper castes in Tamil Nadu.
But duopoly does not mean the dominance of one party in Tamil Nadu
The DMK-led alliance has won three consecutive elections in Tamil Nadu since the 2019 Lok Sabha. However, this is not the only winning streak in Tamil Nadu. There are two other election plans if one of them includes Lok Sabha elections. For example, the AIADMK won the 2011, 2014 and 2016 elections. The DMK won the state in the 2004, 2006 and 2009 elections. Excluding the Lok Sabha elections, the AIADMK is the only party to have won three consecutive parliamentary elections from 1977 to 1984. Interestingly, neither the DMK nor the AIADMK really enjoy widespread geographical dominance in the state. Between 2011 and 2021, only 54 of the 234 assembly assemblies in the state were won by either the DMK or AIADMK in all three elections. This number is much lower than the share of SCs that arch-rivals Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) won in Kerala every time between 2011 and 2021. The pre-2011 ACs cannot be compared with the current one due to the change in AC boundaries in 2008. Another way of looking at the two-party Dravidian dominance of Tamil Nadu politics is that other parties in the state, such as the Congress, the BJP and even the Communists have allied themselves with both the DMK and the AIADMK in various elections.
Roshan Kishore is data and political economy editor at Hindustan Times. His weekly HT Featured Trading Terms column appears every Friday.
