At the Rising Bharat Summit 2024 in New Delhi, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar commented on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘South India Ambitions’, saying people’s opinion in those states is changing. They are seeing the benefits of “good governance”.
Jaishankar highlighted the BJP government’s flagship schemes such as Svanidhi (PM street vendor scheme), Jal Jeevan, Kisan Samman Nidhi, Ayushman Bharat, and said people have realised that these programmes have helped tens and crores of Indians. “The combination of all these things tells you that something is changing,” he added.
When asked about why South India will be BJP’s new frontier, Jaishankar said there was a time when there were no BJP MPs in many states. So, the BJP was a “new frontier” in those states at some point.
He also highlighted PM’s roadshows in Coimbatore and Palakkad (Kerala), and said he is confident about how “this will work out electorally”.
He further said people nowadays are taking more interest foreign policy as they believe in the country more strongly, and South India “if not more” shares the same sentiment.
On allegations by regional parties that BJP is “anti-South India”, and is a “Hindi party”, Jaishankar said the PM has already put that speculation to rest. The fact that he conducted the Kashi-Tamil Sangamam and Tamil-Saurashtra Sangamam is quite self-explanatory. PM Modi has taken “enormous pains to counter that propaganda that has vitiated our politics for very many years. And my sense is today you are getting that traction”, he pointed out.
The BJP had gained only 25 Lok Sabha seats from Karnataka and four from Telangana out of the total 129 seats from five states of South India in 2019.
PM Modi was in Salem in Tamil Nadu on March 19, and mentioned to the crowd about an auditor ‘Ramesh’ who was hacked to death.
A day before, he addressed a rally in Telangana’s Jagtial, and said, “The biggest festival of democracy begins.” Jagtial is part of the Nizamabad Lok Sabha constituency. The Prime Minister claimed that there is a BJP wave in Telangana while Congress and BRS will face defeat.
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