The shrillness of Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister on the issue of delimitation is attracting considerable attention from the commentariat. Speeches are being made, and articles are being written—a torrent of spilt ink and words everywhere. Even the Rupee symbol, a creation of a DMK MLA’s son and once enthusiastically endorsed by former Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, has not been spared.

Yet we must ask ourselves—why, and why particularly Tamil Nadu?

Those familiar with the history of the British project known as Dravidianism will easily recognise that the Chief Minister’s so-called concerns are a smokescreen. As the Dravidian movement enters its terminal phase, these are frustrated last-ditch attempts to revive the same tired divisions that once propelled it, so that the family and business interests of the current regime may be artificially prolonged.

First, there is a calculated attempt to rectify the very first failure of the Dravidian movement—its eradication from all of India except Tamil Nadu. One must recall that the DMK’s predecessor, the Justice Party, once included a sizeable number of leaders who were not Tamil, and who allied with intermediate castes in Tamil Nadu to assert social and economic dominance. Yet this multi-caste alliance ultimately faltered. Much like the breakup of Pakistan in 1971, the limited commonalities they shared were insufficient to hold these disparate groupings together.

Thus, the dream of De Nobili, Caldwell, Pope, and Grant-Duff—that the South could somehow be convinced it was not Sanatani, not Bharatiya, and that it did not belong within a unified Bharat—came to an end. Only Tamil Nadu held out. The present clarion call to other southern parties is an invitation to those wandering in political wilderness: to once again weaponise hatred for Sanatana Dharma, stoke ethnic anxieties, and claw back some semblance of power and relevance—a reversion to the original Dravidian formulation.

Second—and closely related to the foregoing point—is the ritual invocation of the word “federalism." India is not a federation. The word appears nowhere in the Constitution, and Parliament retains the unilateral authority to create or dissolve states as it sees fit. A federation is a union of multiple, previously distinct countries or peoples coming together under one........

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