Over the past decade Charan’s career has taken off. The software engineer from the south Indian city of Hyderabad takes foreign holidays each year, regularly dines at swanky restaurants and recently moved into a new apartment in the affluent Banjara Hills district.
At 35, he personifies the aspirational vision of a modern tech-driven India championed by Narendra Modi, who has been prime minister for all of those ten years.
But as the world’s biggest democracy embarks this week on a general election that features 44 days of voting, Charan is a problem for Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“I don’t like the BJP’s use of language and religion, the targeting of Muslims, to divide the country,” said Charan, who will vote for the opposition Congress party and withheld his last name out of concern he could be targeted by pro-Modi social media trolls.
“The south is more a tolerant place. We don’t buy into all that BJP stuff. And then they penalise us through keeping our tax for their people and constant investigations into our leaders.”
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Even though Charan has personally flourished under Modi he will not be voting for the Hindu nationalist leader’s party. Nor will many of his friends in the Hyderabad tech crowd and nor will many other Indians all over the south of the country — the engine room of India’s current economic boom.
Modi is the clear frontrunner to win a third term thanks to the BJP’s grip on the largely Hindi-speaking northern and western states. In these heavily populated heartlands the party’s robust mix of strident Hindu religious identity, welfare programmes for the poor and focus on infrastructure development — backed by the prime minister’s strong approval ratings — have translated into political dominance.
That is why the south has emerged as the most hotly contested and closely watched battleground in this year’s elections. Modi’s campaign schedule indicates that he is desperate to make deep inroads there for reasons that may include both political advantage and personal pride.
He has made more than 20 visits to the south this year, with many more made by his senior lieutenants. Last week, the prime minister made yet another trip to the region with a two-day swing through Tamil Nadu, the most populous of the southern states, but where none of the 39 MPs are from the BJP.
Campaigning is intense ahead of the first polls opening on Friday in an election that will be staged in seven rounds running until June 1 in India’s 28 states and eight union territories.
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The logistics are staggering, with 1.05 million polling stations, 15 million election workers and 968 million eligible voters. The winner will be announced on June 4.
The five southern states are home to nearly 20 per cent of the population — 275 million of the 1.4 billion total.
They account for 31 per cent of GDP and 35 per cent of foreign investment. When it comes to the tech sector the divide is even starker.
The region delivers about two-thirds of Indian’s IT service industry exports. As Apple pivots away from production in China, its suppliers now make one in seven iPhones in India, overwhelmingly in the south.
But the BJP secured just 11 per cent of the votes and took less than 10 per cent of the seats there in the 2019 elections, even while the party and its smaller allies won a national landslide, taking 353 of the 543 seats.
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At state level, the BJP has no foothold. Congress won control last year in Telangana’s assembly elections, defeating a provincial party, and in Karnataka, where they they ousted the BJP from its only southern bastion. Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh are run by powerful regional parties, while Kerala is governed by the communist party. There is resentment, as Charan suggested, against Modi’s comprehensive centralisation of power, as well as tax levies and spending decisions, in which opposition states are often the largest tax-payers.
In Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana, the sleek architectural landmarks of American tech giants bear testimony to the city’s trajectory.
On the city outskirts, a new financial district — dubbed “Cyberabad” — has sprung up, its gleaming towers, gated communities and upmarket shops a far cry from the packed bazaars and fading palaces of the old town.
Google recently started to build a 3 million sq ft edifice, its largest office outside California, while Amazon opened its biggest global campus there in 2019.
The city is also India’s largest manufacturer of pharmaceutical ingredients and a centre of the defence industry.
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Further south in Karnataka, the digital citadel of Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) is home to India’s “silicon valley” and start-up capital. Among its plethora of tech luminaries is Infosys, the multibillion pound empire co-owned by Rishi Sunak’s wife and her family.
There is a gulf in living standards between the south and the north.
In Uttar Pradesh, the most solid BJP state and home to 241 million people, average annual income is less than £800. In Karnataka and Telangana it is four times that.
The national poverty rate is 11.28 per cent, but in Kerala, the figure is 0.5 per cent while in Uttar Pradesh it is 17.4 per cent. Sixty out of 1,000 newborns in the largest state die before they are five — a higher mortality rate than in Afghanistan. In Kerala, the survival rate is better than the US average, according to UN data.
The BJP needs to capture seats in the south and also in West Bengal, to achieve its goal of securing an even larger parliamentary majority than in 2019, possibly to try to change India’s secular constitution or to impose Hindi, not widely spoken in the south, as a national language.
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But for Modi and his party, there is also honour at stake. Without the south the BJP lacks a pan-Indian mandate for its distinct vision of a strong Hindu India after three-quarters of a century of independence.
“The BJP mission is total domination,” said Yamini Aiyar, head of the Centre for Policy Research think tank. “The party has deep ideological roots and wants to spread its Hindutva [Hindu nationalist] ideology across the whole country.”
The south is also critical to the BJP’s strategy of crushing Congress as India’s only other truly national political force.
The party of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, once one of the most formidable electoral machines in the world, is now attempting to hold off a BJP onslaught and rebuild for the future after returning just 52 MPs at the last election.
More than half its seats are in the south, including since 2019 that of its leader Rahul Gandhi, who lost the Uttar Pradesh constituency previously held by his mother, father and uncle — but won a safe back-up seat in the friendlier terrain of Kerala.
In its southern strategy, the BJP has adapted to focus more on the economy and less on religion and conservative nationalist ideology. Modi has, however, maintained his combative approach to the region’s leaders. When several state chiefs protested in New Delhi about taxation and withheld federal funding for local projects, he accused them of seeking to “break the nation”.
The party rejects criticisms made by detractors in the south. It insists that tax shares are fair, that several corruption investigations of opposition leaders in the south are independent, and that it promotes neglected Hindu interests but does not foment religious strife.
Suresh Kochattil, a BJP social media strategist in the south, predicted that the party would poll strongly in Karnataka and pick up seats elsewhere.
“When voters make their choice, the achievements of PM Modi and his government will be more attractive than the non-record of a serial loser like Rahul Gahul,” he said.
But Uttam Kumar Reddy, a senior figure in the Congress government in Telangana, said the opposition was on course for an improved vote tally.
“The BJP may have achieved some electoral success in the north by trying to divide society on religious lines and identity politics, but that strategy has been consistently proven not to work in the south,” he said.
A new fault line is looming beyond this year’s election — the redrawing in 2026 of parliamentary constituency boundaries after a long-delayed national census. The south seems set to lose influence in the redistribution as its birthrates have fallen in recent years, another factor in its greater affluence.
MK Stalin, the Tamil Nadu chief minister, has described the shake-up as a “sword hanging over the south”.
But the south also poses its own threat to Modi and his grand ambitions to reshape the country. For the prime minister’s critics, it offers a model for a very different India, of a secular nation thriving economically and socially without the underpinning of Hindu nationalism. Combating that message is why Modi has made a southern breakthrough such a priority when polls open this week.
