When the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was proclaimed by the Party spokesperson as “janeu dhari Hindu”, neither the Party supporters nor its opponents were amused. Both sides saw it as an act of desperation; the opponents were emboldened while the supporters were disheartened. Imitation of an opponent’s stance is always interpreted as a lack of depth of ideological commitment and creates apprehension of ideological uncertainty in the future; that is the first step in the inevitable erosion of the support base. Ideology is the umbrella that gives the feeling of shelter to the supporters; perceiving or apprehending holes in that umbrella gives even committed supporters occasion for a rethink.

Let us take the case of the DMK and its various iterations in Tamil Nadu. For non-Tamil speakers, its tongue-twisting name translates to Dravidian Progressive Federation. The word ‘Progressive’ was long ago hijacked by the Left. Unlike laissez-faire capitalism, progressivism bats for government intervention, destruction of large corporations, state-funded social security for healthcare, education and guaranteed wages even without work. Founded by C. N. Annadurai shortly after Independence, the Party ultimately gained power in 1967 displacing the Congress and became the fifth largest party in the Lok Sabha in the 2024 elections. The founding driving force for the DMK was anti-Brahminism and had evolved from the Dravidar Kazhagam movement of Periyar, who was averse to electoral politics and wanted to focus on social reform. Annadurai, however, had political ambitions and split from Periyar.

All went well for the DMK till the flamboyant Jayalalitha, an icon of the Tamil silver screen came on the scene. She was born into an orthodox Tamil Iyengar Brahmin family and was never coy about that identity. Though the actor-politician M. G. Ramachandran had formed the Anna DMK in 1972 and renamed it as the All India Anna DMK in 1976, the grassroot support base of the splinter group always had a huge overlap with that of the DMK. Yet, Jayalalitha’s ascendance as the Chief Minister in 1991 demolished the unwritten rule in the DMK that a Chief Minister in the lineage of Annadurai ideology had to be a non-Brahmin. The strict atheism of Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement was openly flouted by Jayalalitha by the overt practice of Hindu rituals, visits to prominent temples and performing havans and pujas. She used state funds for temples, introduced Annadhanam, a mid-day meal scheme for temples and organised government-funded spiritual tours. She promoted a mother cult around her, rebranding herself as Amma, replacing the caste-catered approach of Annadurai with a welfare-centered maternal populism, generously distributing free electrical gadgets and other freebies to the poor. Highly state-subsidised Amma Canteens and medicine outlets appealed to the weaker sections of society, eroding the DMK’s anti-Brahmin consolidation.

Having weakened the core of the DMK ideology, it was a matter of time before the DMK and its offshoots would lose the electoral battle to alternatives and allow space for the creation of a niche support base for the BJP in Tamil Nadu. The 2026 election sent the DMK to the opposition benches, bringing to power a party not owing allegiance to Annadurai. The story is somewhat similar in the decline of the Left in Kerala. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP made significant inroads into Kerala and the blame fell on the Left. The Left Democratic Front (LDF) stood accused of pandering to Hindu caste organisations like the Nair Service Society and Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam and promoting events like the Global Ayappa Conclave. It was alleged by the cadres that the party had lost its moorings and this drift cost them dearly in terms of their traditional voter-support base. The tilt towards Hindu organisations eroded the Left’s minority base too. Imitation cost the Left dearly; they could not gain anything on the Hindu side and lost credibility among the Muslim and Christian minorities. This culminated in the LDF defeat in the 2026 Assembly elections.

The story of Mamata Banerjee is even a starker reminder of the perils of imitation in electoral politics. She was a member of the ‘progressive’ left-leaning Indian National Congress till 1998, when she realised the incapability of that Party to dislodge the Left from power in West Bengal, which had ruled continuously since 1977 and did what is considered the ultimate act of treachery among the progressives. Her party, the All-India Trinamool Congress, joined the BJP coalition led by Atal Behari Vajpayee in 1998 and she became a minister in the Union Cabinet. When the Congress came back to power in 2004, she parted ways with the BJP and that effectively reduced her stature to a regional leader, but of a strong stature when she achieved the seemingly impossible task of defeating the Left and becoming Chief Minister of West Bengal in 2011.

She tried to imitate the Left, Congress and BJP, all at the same time, in order to stay in power, which she succeeded in for 15 years. She adopted the corrupt Left’s cadre with the same promises of “cut money” that had kept them ‘loyal’ to the Communists for more than three decades. The problem of corruption and extortion by the cadres got totally out of hand once the iron-hand-control of the Communist Party was gone. Eight years into the Chief Minister’s chair, India Today reported on 22 June 2019 that faced with the loss of two Lok Sabha Seats to the BJP in Nadia District, she admonished the Party cadres of the district in rather frank terms, “I do not want to keep thieves in my party. If I take action they will join some other party. Some leaders are claiming 25 per cent commission for providing housing grants to the poor. This should stop immediately. Return the money if any of you have taken it.”

Mamata unwittingly admitted that the cadres’ loyalty was to the money and not to her. The news report said that the reaction of the local leaders was brutal; one of them said to the Press, “It is a sort of insult. If we had taken any cut money then we had also given a major chunk of it to top party leaders. What about that? Will they also return that money?” This internal squabble was compounded by the fact that her political space was being squeezed by an ascendant BJP with many senior leaders deserting her for the party in power in New Delhi. Unable to take the pressure, she started imitating the BJP too, naively believing that imitating the two political extremes will go unnoticed. She started doling out liberal cash grants to Durga Puja clubs, gradually increasing the money from ₹ 10,000 per club in 2018 to ₹60,000 per club in 2025. With the jump in the number of beneficiaries from 28,000 to 45,000, the budget outflow zoomed from 28 crore to 258 crore.

Having lost the loyalty of the lotus-eater ex-Communist cadres and not getting the right response from the Hindu groups, Mamata turned to her old mates, the Congress Party. She played a leading role in forming the INDI Alliance, even aspiring to be its prime ministerial candidate, which sought to hijack the acronym INDIA even as some leaders fumbled by calling it INDIA Alliance. The TMC, an off-shoot of the Congress, had retained the Left-of-Centre stance of the Congress but could not successfully imitate the massive organisation structure of the Grand Old Party, even in its declining phase. Conflict is bound to arise when you share a limited space with a large elephant particularly when there are armed hunters around looking for the elephant. Mamata could never finalise a seat sharing arrangement with the Congress while the BJP successfully projected her Party as a bedfellow of the Congress. Both the Congress and the TMC have been at the receiving end in this struggle but the larger Congress has survived for the moment while the TMC has been all but decimated with Mamata losing even her own seat. Marquis de Sade had said, “It is only by imitating the vices of others that I have earned my misfortunes.” Political parties, which imitate to befool voters, may well remember these words. / DAILYWORLD /

( R N prasher is a former IAS officer. The views expressed are his personal. )