Introduction

This essay discusses aspects of political integration in south India, focusing on the last quarter of the 20th century. In it I attempt to link issues of personal and group identity to discourses on a moral community which are implicit in the language of politicians.

The observation that ideology does not play a major role in political dynamics has often been found in both scholarly writing and journalistic commentary on Indian politics. In the early 1980s, Narain and Mathur noted that factional conflicts and party desertions, among other phenomena, had led to the widespread belief that ideological elements were negligible in political practice. James Manor, for example, went so far as to argue that political anomie, or ‘normlessness’, was evident from the years 1973–4 onward. He defined anomie as:

Atul Kohli characterised political developments in the 1980s in terms of the widespread focus on the personalities of political leaders in the midst of processes of deinstitutionalisation. In their article from 1984, however, Narain and Mathur took exception to the reigning opinion, arguing that ideology was a significant force in Indian politics. Even before the striking emergence of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party on the national stage, they found that nationalism, of various sorts, was a common theme throughout the country.