 So good afternoon everybody from London and a very warm welcome to all of you joining the SOAS South Asia Institute session today, which is on the Tamil Nadu elections, rhetoric, ideology and alliances, the future of Dravidian politics. As you can see this event is in aid of the collective fundraising towards the Tamil Nadu Chief Ministers Covid Relief Fund. The donations can be made directly to the CMPRF, the Government of Tamil Nadu's Public Relief Fund, you're able to directly donate to the fund following our links here on the site. I'm Sanjukta Ghosh, your host, as well as the cook, the convener of the Sanglap Forum, which is the discussion forum, mainly we have focused for this on electoral politics and culture. So the today's topic kind of relates to the general trend in the national elections in India, which many of you who are familiar with South Asian regional politics, as well as national politics know that it's really about a very high-pitched political drama and a lot of contestations of political parties, as well as a competition of different kinds of promises during elections and after. So the recent kind of assembly elections in the months of April and May, we've seen various phases, as well as state elections that brings into sharper focus, the regional power contestations opposing the majoritarian parity agenda party as the ruling parliamentary party. Now following the 16th legislative assembly election that was held in Tamil Nadu for the 234 constituencies, we will look at the dynamics of that state, the southern state of India. And all our speakers will really reflect on both the past trends in the Tamil political culture, but also comment on the emergence of partisan alliances that is based on caste identity questions of Dalit identity, the rising focus on Hindu, on the Hindu to a populism, as well as issues of governance and more generally on development in the state that emerges from caste based alliances. So, when we started the sunlap session on this kind of, you know, reflecting on assembly elections that we recently held for the Bengal assembly elections, we had a lot of interest from from people and they were asking me, you know, whether I'm going to do that, and the first thing that came to my mind is really to look at the southern states. And that is because we don't really want to focus on analyzing so much of the electoral data because the elections are over, but to look at how the shifts and the changes in the party system can therefore be shown to really look at the changes in the political system more generally as well. So that is something I thought of bringing into this session, but for the Bengal elections. The session was held while the election was going on. So there were quite a lot of speculation on data and it was quite speculative as well. However, we want to look at and reflect more on how the 2019 looks by elections left some kind of footprints as to how the state would therefore cope with the consolidation of majoritarian power of the center and in favor of the BGP as well. So there would be issues around minorities, recognition of minorities in the context of majoritarian values and how these values are therefore reflected in the state level as well. The discussion really comes at a crucial time when the BJP is also facing some kind of an anti-incumbency sentiment at the state level as well. There's a strong tendency therefore to consider India as a union of states. And previously, if you go back to our Facebook live session, which is recorded on the Sunlap page as well as the South Asian Institute page you will find that we have discussed why states are important and what kind of powers that states do have that enables them to exercise those as well as remain some kind of model of governance. But currently I think for the South it's it's it'll be interesting to see how a successful Dravidian model emerges in Tamil Nadu and and the first two speakers we have here will reflect on the success of the Dravidian movement in the past, as well as what would be there for the owners of the DMK that you can see on the map on the left is is the red color coded bit on the map which shows the extent of the DMK, that is the Dravidia Munitra Kazagam and and how it's managed to mobilize its strength across the state in this assembly election. I'm very fortunate to have Dr Ariland Naganathan, the DMK MLA of Tamil Nadu, as well as the consultant physician to speak on the inclusive Dravidian model of development. Dr Naganathan is a social activist and physician who is based in Chennai. For over a decade, he has worked to make education, particularly health education accessible to the schedule cast schedule tribe and the backward class communities is also the founder of youth org, a nonprofit that works on adequate representation for marginalized communities in the 13 districts of Tamil Nadu. We're going to also move to our second speaker, who is Dr and Professor M Vijay Bhaskar from the Madras Institute of Development Studies, who is also the Charles Wallace visiting fellow in SOAS. He will speak on the developmental challenges post election 2021. We can see here that his main interests, at least he would try to bring out today I'm hoping on the Dravidian model of development, as well as issues that concern the political economy, labor land markets, rural urban linkages and the kind of transformations that we'll see around the issues of neoliberal India and the transformations there. So the third and the fourth speakers again tie up with very specific concepts of the mechanisms of representation in state politics, as well as the political parties, the contests and leadership around that. So we have Dr Jill Vernier from who is the Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ashoka University, as well as the co director of the Trivedi Center for Political Data. He is also the co editor of a forthcoming volume on sociology of elected representatives in India with Professor Christopher Jafferlock and Dr Sanjay Kumar. And he's going to speak on the recomposition of the DMK elite in the third round. The fourth round will be by Dr Andrew Wyatt, who is the senior lecturer of sociology politics and international studies in the University of Bristol. And you can see his, his interests are lined up here, which is to do with national regional politics, and particularly for this session, the regional politics his interest is mostly on party politics, religion, religion, as well as Tamil Nadu. And Dr Wyatt has also, you know, his his recent and forthcoming publication also on Tamil Nadu's political pluralism as well as party system changes, which is going to be brought out by stage. Our final speaker is Selvam Selvam. Herani Dharan is the co founder of the Oxford Policy advisory group who is also the former youth leader to the World Democracy Forum and United Nations. He will speak on past, present and future of Dravidian ideology. He's also a multilingual professional with eight years of experience in developing countries to do consultancy with five years of academic experience. And here in with Selvam we can see his focus would be really on the issues of social justice equality and the impact of Dravidian ideology, more specifically on the societal changes. And finally, I would also welcome Dr. Prabhu Rajendra, who is the Vice Chair of the World Tamil Organization, to give us some observers comments and conclude the session with Q&A. So those of you who are participants on this Zoom forum, I would request you to put all questions under the Q&A box and to restrict Q&A under chat, which is something that we will pick up from the Facebook live sessions. So with that, I'm going to pass it on to our first speaker. Erlen Naganathan, if you would like to start your presentation please, and whatever you have to say at the start, that would be great. And Sunil, if we can have the focus on the speakers. Good evening to everyone. I have a small problem by the South Asia Institute to bring up such a topic of discussion, especially there's a constant neglect, especially mainstream narratives about the Dravidian models of development or analysis of a sub nationalist government electoral election. So because it has been projected the previous intellectual world that India means Delhi and Delhi means India. I congratulate you Institute that you'll start thinking about the boundaries away from Delhi, thinking about Bengal and Tamil Nadu. So that the perspective of regional discourses can be revealed to the world. Your pick up a man straight from the election scenario, dark from the battleground, that too as a, I have to thank my constituency people who made me as their member of the legislative assembly fighting against an ideology platform, being belonging to the Dravidian stock myself. I faced direct candidate from Bharata Janatha Party BJP, and add star painters from BJP including Amit Shah and big giants like Smithyani to campaign in the constituency. And Tamil Nadu people gave a fitting reply of 30,000 votes difference between myself and my BJP candidate. So, in 2021, still ideological platform and electoral scenario plays a major role, which is responsible for DMK to bounce back to power after 10 years, because the opposite ADMK which is also a pseudo Dravidian party I would say, right on the plans of BJP. People thought that the regional aspiration state autonomy, their social justice program have been into big danger in the previous ADMK regimen. So they voted DMK for the major revamp of Dravidian ethos into the social and political spheres of social justice, state autonomy and protection of samurai identity and culture, which has been the three main plants in which the Dravidian ethos and political parties has been built up by DMK from its inception from 1929. Before going into that, we talk about the Dravidian model of development. We should be very clear to ascertain to the viewers what is Aryan model is, what is an Aryan model, we have to do a cut section from into newspaper about the percentage of a PC class in the Indian judicial system, especially the Supreme Court. We have to analyze the percentage of the PC class in all the union government secretary post, right from the cabinet secretary as to cabinet secretary, which belongs to 97% to 98% of one class. We have to clearly identify the domination of the PC class in IITs and IAMs, the central institutes, or the governing epitomes, or any central premier institute across the country. We have to also clearly depict the percentage of the PC class present in media houses, both private media, electronic media, the decision making what used to be put up in a television news channel or in a mainstream newspaper. So when you do an analysis of the entire Aryan model which has been depicted as a so called national model, so the resistance, we come for a tradition of resistors. So what is a Dravidian model? I would explain a simple pyramid form. See, any type of intervention, whether in the form of health or education, perclets down, perclets down under to the masses. Only if there is a social transformation or a civil society transformation takes place, whether it's going to be a political transfer of power or delivering education to the masses or to the health, especially in this caste nation, where the oppression. As you see, there is various types of oppression across the world. This subcontinent plays a different type of oppression in the form of a hierarchical caste system sanctioned by religious scriptures and people governing class trying to protect it and implement it and make a way of people adapt to that particular system and thinking that there's a way of life. In this structure of hierarchical system, which is more prevalent even in modern days in India, we have to analyze that when the majority of the working class or the subject class or the oppressed classes, whether it's most backward or the shaded class or the shaded class, which forms 60 to 70 or 80% of the population of this country. The civil society transformation have to take place if you want political power to perclet down under, if you want any educational intervention to perclet down under, or if you want any health intervention to perclet down under. Without that civil society transformation, all the benefits of transfer will be limited to the upper cream state. So if you have a pyramid, when the effects of the pyramid, it's from the elite or the basic class. And if you have the intermediate caste and the working class. When you have an intervention like this, like the social intervention or political intervention or health intervention, but the majority plan goes to the effects. When all types of interventions like health and education or political empowerment, only a small percentage goes to the masses at the base. So what is David model is so David model is nothing but the truth model, giving the same inverted pyramid of delivery, no reverse it. So that social justice program, or regional autonomy, or the preservation of subaltern identities forms a similar picture. So where you have the resistance, the resistance naturally will be from the few who have been enjoying, continue to enjoy the privileges of oppression based on religious sanctions, and based on a caste hierarchical system. So that's David model access roots, especially this part of the subcontinent, because we have an egalitarian type of way of living. We have Tamil scriptures, especially through more, through more, or kind of expressing that universal pattern, those it was I've been in my, even in recent security excavations, which is happened in the middle part of Tamil Nadu, we didn't find any type of belief system or ideal worship. So it was basically an egalitarian societies, where more of Dravidian values and Dravidian history from the Arab Mogadans arrow, or to the excavation towns and security. So some type of egalitarian ethos have been there. So constantly, many scholars, or many activists have to remember this concept of egalitarianism in various forms in the history of Tamil Nadu. So we had this moment. We had Ramadigalhar movement. We had Ayodhya Dasar's movement. So every type of movement took place. But, but when it needs for a political change over, because we have seen migrations of invasions from the outside, especially on various periods down. Even the British colonization tried to give us some sort of shape to this particular entity of project of India. So when the, after the Montechel's home took place. So there was limited elite who took up the major positions resistance came from the south, especially from the Madras presidents. So that forms the Dravidian home from Dr. Nadesan, Dr. by himself, the formation of Justice League, the Justice Party. Then who did a political local self-comment was the first local self-comment when compared to rest of India, formed by a non-congress based on a communal geo based on egalitarian values based on removing all this superstitious structures, especially reformations, especially in field of health education. So that forms a political transformation took place. But we need an icon like Periyar to do that civil transformation project very aggressively because the society should move away from superstitions gas based which is linked to every part to the worshipping entities. So that radical transformation needs the self-respectors movement so that the elite non-brahmanical orientation only in political sphere converted the language into the masses. So when Dravidian ethos of egalitarian values, scientific temper, then preservation of cultural identities, transfer down, transfer down and up. Masses took up, especially in this part of this country. Masses took up the project of self-respect movement. So when masses got oriented about their true identity, the culture, linguistic movement and women liberation, all entities, when the Indian project of independence came into and we were converted republic, naturally it evolved into a political format. So the rise of DMK, maybe a default or a resistant movement against DK, it carried the both social as well as the political program of Dravidian ethos into action. So the concepts of social justice within the framework of Indian constitution and Indian republic as an electoral party to participate within the framework of the Indian constitution. Thanks to Dr. Babasav Kambitkar who based this constitution on principles of equality, fraternity and brotherhood and secularism, but there was a constant fight from the DMK about regional aspirations. It wanted the federal setup to be set into action. The state autonomy, the Dravidian project, converted into a state autonomy project to complete federal project, complete financial sovereignty, health and education, so that this pleuristic India can be hold together. So that's what the first talk of Anand Rajasabha, he said, yes, I belong to Dravidian stock, but we have got something to offer, something to offer to this country. The offering was, if this country has been set on true federal principles, if the country had to move in the lines of social justice, understanding and respecting the pleuristic nature, like United States of India maybe, this country would have progressed in a much more larger, better way and in order to, in a development model, more stronger. So that Dravidian model of development was always enshrined in the values of all the leaders who took up the major positions in the electoral politics. So from the footstep of Anand Rajasabha came Kalinger. See, as you know, this country is divided into agricultural sector, then we have a manufacturing sector, then we have the service sector. First Kalinger took the massive agricultural transformation or agricultural transformation to the masses from the period of 1971 to 1976. If you're able to analyze all the studies on aggregating reforms without any bloodshed, there was a transfer of huge fertile lands from the oldings of temples, from the oldings of few priestly class, from the oldings of few landlords, by the Land Sealing Act or Tenancy Only Act. It got transferred to the most backward as well as sugar class communities involved in agriculture, agriculture production. So that's why when you involve the masses, especially in country like India, when you involve the masses, there'll be mass production. And before DMT came to power, there was a huge hummine. It had only a two month relations for its people. But after a transfer of agricultural production from the masses, we were in surplus. And with the scientific emperor, we involved a lot of technology innovations. I remember Kalinger visited Punjab. I forgot the chiefness's name. He wanted to develop a typical agricultural university similar to what is in Punjab in Tamil Nadu. So it was responsible for the Coimbatore Agriculture University who had found huge innovations in agriculture. So here with scientific temper, innovations agriculture, in one line, we have the land holdings being transferred to the masses and production in excess came in. Kalinger was able to give 2,000 tons, 3,000 tons, 4,000 tons respectively when the rest of India was in command to Karnataka, to Gujarat and to the northern state. So, during that 71-76 period, as a thousand likes man in my constituency, there are 16 housing board or slum clearance board, or I would say, Guduse Matuvarayum in Tamil, where it will be huts. In 1971-76, Kalinger converted all the huts and converted them into flats. It is about the self-respect given. Why are people in huts? Why can't it be in a flat, in a three-storey building with a separate bathroom, with a separate bedroom, with a separate hall? So when I walked into my constituency, when I look into the pictures of the elderly people who fought for this moment, I see a lot of Kalinger's photographs among huts. Now I'm meeting the grandsons and granddaughters during the electoral journey. They were able to describe how hard his grandfather or grandmother or his uncle fought for this dividend movement, especially with various struggles for social justice and anti-Indian agitations by the DMK. They're all in huts. So Kalinger thought, let us give them dignity in order to make them live into flat tenantsments. So it was acknowledged by many international observers who said, how could you convert around, say, 1,50,000 people in huts that convert into flat-storey buildings? And imagine the intervention of removing the hand-pulled hand rickshaw into a tricycle rickshaw. That type of social intervention was clubbed with the project of livelihood. I would say, see the health intervention. So Kalinger in 71, 76 brought the famous Anulithitam in Tamil, we say, because it would give a vision. Because at the time cataract water speak, many underprivileged section were not having access to develop, remove their cataract surgeries done. And actually the production of their livelihood will be limited by 45 to 50 to 60 years. So he did huge camps for cataract surgeries in Tamil Nadu. Within a span of two years, around 2.5 lakh to 3 lakh people got their cataract operated in their rural primary health centers and villages, which is very much acknowledged by a German ophthalmologist called Siersburger. Community ophthalmologist was completely perplexed by the effort of Kalinger in removing cataract surgeries so that the productivity of each individual in case of 20 years or 30 years. Simple scattered examples, I would say, take the leprosy eradication program of the center. Kalinger co-opted the leprosy eradication program into a beggar relief program and he constructed leprosy homes, rehabilitation homes, where 7 days, 3 days a meal will be given. Every Sunday, non-vegetarian meal, they had a vocational training program for rehabilitation. He also constructed schools in leprosy homes so that people of their respective children can be educated. He had a doctor and nurse visited in leprosy eradication homes. So leprosy was completely eradicated by the central government project along with beggar rehabilitation program so that the livelihood increases. So when you have a person from the masses, he thinks about the masses. So many of the dividend leaders are from the masses. So when they are from the masses, their thought process is to how to improve the livelihood of 2 to 3 people out of their poverty. Take the education intervention, the various, see, this is a caste-ridden program. So what is social justice? Again, it is a caste-based program to undo the wrongdoings. So all type of, you're being confused into an economic program or economic liberation program. No, when you have a caste-iracist system be placed, when service sector is being dominated by priestly classes or professional courses are dominated by priestly classes, we need to undo the program by a similar caste-based intervention, which is an affirmative action, which is widely acknowledged, especially in the Michigan case in the United States or in Australia or any other parts of the world, even in South Africa, where people go ahead to ask for affirmative action even in private companies who are investing in South Africa. Here we are in a very, Tamil Nadu, it isn't at a very utmost level. People think it's based on population. No, it's not based on population. You should understand the social justice program in Tamil Nadu is coupled with rationalism and regional tendencies where it gives a privilege or it gives an access for an underprivileged section, maybe a backward or most backward or inner reservation among the scheduled caste communities to understand, to have an access to a professional education to become a doctor or to become an engineer, not as a proportional representation, but to understand the dignity, to understand the self-respect, to understand that he can match with any of the professionals in the world. He can match with any of the professionals in the previous subsequent years where his father or his grandfather have been denied access to any type of education to make him feel confident that he can come into the mainstream. That's why if you analyze the intention, in fact, the doctor population ratio is equivalent to Finland and Tamil Nadu. One is 253. The public health system is very stronger. We have around 17,000 doctors and 27,000 nerds working in the government public health system. Because in order to deliver health to the rural and the underprivileged section of the society, the relevant model took the concept of educating the underprivileged section and the rural people to become doctors and nurses to deal with the profession. Now the center in Delhi is out to implement the rural health program. They're finding out ways, they're finding out collateral entries or other type of paramedical courses or even non-allopathic doctors stream into the delivery of rural care. But in Tamil Nadu, the simple strategy is hit the rural care, uplift the rural care, just making workforce from the rural sections of the society. So the entire social justice program implemented by the evidence parties in Delhi were able to empower. So if you see the rural quota for affirmative action given in 96 and 2001 of Calangate period, or inner reservation given to the manual scavenging population of Tamil Nadu to become doctors in which the parents were working as community health workers or sweepers, their sons have become deans and nephrologists and cardiologists in the same government medical colleges. Those type of narrations have got converted into reality because political stream and the social justice stream with regional autonomy passed in line together. So where we face resistance, who struck down the rural quota, who brought in the famous meritorious or merit based exams, especially to nullify the Tamil Nadu program, who struck down the 50% rural affirmative action provisions given for rural health doctors in post graduate education, who struck down the super specific courses given to government institution doctors in government medical colleges, who struck down the entire public health structure. I would say the same are in model I would recollect in the judicial system and the Delhi centric bureaucratic policy makers irrespective of the government center. So that's why regionalism comes to play, that's why federalism comes to play. Now we want to restore Dr. Ambedkar's constitution what it said health and education to be in the state list. The Kotari Commission 1978 very clearly said that health and education should be in the state list. Any attempts to move it from the state list will react to confusion and chaos. That's what's happening. We saw the center handling the pandemic now. Our centralized way of doing things have lead to chaos and confusion where it fails to respect the regional differences and regional strengths and weaknesses of each and every state, where regional states have never took part in any type of consultation process in the initial, initial vaccine policies or vaccine procurement or ventilator procurement or essential procurement. So, so, there we didn't political system as trying to give attempts repeatedly are trying to teach lessons to the center repeatedly. Come on this, this deviant way of system is a success model where you can try to emulate in other states. So now MAMTA's energy office Bengal is trying to do that. We see under pressure is trying to do that. We have seen, even though Karnataka is holding by BJP government, the reservation system is quite stronger region aspirations quite stronger. So when you have a when you have an underprivileged section project, the upliftment in the livelihood in sectors of education, health and other intervention. So that increases the human capital. So that's why during 96 in 2001, when globalization project came into India, when the development project in the name of reforms, I would say they say reforms know the globalization project came into India. 60 to 70% of entrepreneurships belonging to backward and scheduled class scheduled communities only in Tamil Nadu and the rest of the state. Women entrepreneurs because colleague in 1989 government gave property rights to women. It was Ambedkar's dream. It was also an Ambedkar reason to resign from the nearest cabinet. It was done in Tamil Nadu in 89 and maximum number of women entrepreneurship are also from Tamil Nadu. There are 10 lakh to 6 lakh of MSMEs. But what the demonization and just you did it closed on our own. Many one lakh companies were closed on because small entrepreneurship were not able to survive the onslaught. So again, it's from the center, which are without without taking into consultation of the states. See the draconian way of GST implementation we are assisting here from this part of the state. So when you look at the entire picture of the trajectory when when we have a composite type of government at the center. For example, whether it's national front government in the 90s or united front government experiments. Or you would say when the India one by led by hotel be here you watch by which as a consultative process representation of many states or the up of one. You see the development module was much more inclusive acknowledging the states. Even a writing force party was not able to implement this way of things as it's implementing now. Now we have a fair open minded India to the majority in type of center with no much of participation of the any of the ministers I would say. I would I would see only the minister prime minister and the PM office. I can't even remember of the various cabinets in the center. The authoritative way of implementing things the authoritative way of amendments created in the parliament in various aspects. The authoritative way of amending the constitution about the whims and baffles without respecting the nature of the tendency of the Constitution. Where forefathers have given some space for the center in times of emergency and commands where you see us as happening, especially using those emergency provisions where state has been this reduced in the form of a district module. Again, gravity model here as to offer to the rest of the states of the country about regional aspiration about federalism and preserving cultural identity to resist any type of attempts which try to impose. Or try to neglect or which try to suppress each and regional entities. It has the lessons to offer. And we are evolving and we are evolving. Yes, we will for the better good. So we also understand that our socialistic agenda are social transformation agenda or our space working in cultural spheres. It is not given much importance as we are in the political program. So as you see if you if you find a critical analysis. The strong tenant or strong segment of DMK is their social cultural project and the political project. If the social cultural project is going to be on the backseat, this political project wouldn't run more effectively. So we have to revamp the way of narration to the subsequent youth population in in educating them about the success stories in educating them, what are the what are the mistakes and rectification measures out to deliver to the younger generation, so that we got an egalitarian way of living to offer. So with that I'll arrest my case. Yeah, that's that's great that's that's a great start. I think it sets out our agenda very well. And the kind of overview you've given in the context of what is happening now, as well as the some of the latest measures that you've also talked of you know we'll probably revisit the questions of affirmative action. Specifically, when we talk of the shifts within political parties, as well as an evaluation of political economy and the kind of impacts. There's also lessons to be learned from whether the owners is now going to be on DMK to mobilize the party and resist this kind of onslaught on federalism and social justice that you have talked of in your paper as well you know, since you are representing the party there's also that kind of party owners and party line that obviously has filtered through your presentation as well. And it's nice to get that kind of historical background as well for those of us who are trying to understand the region in more granular detail from this to get a glimpse of the history as well. And the very grassroots that you talk of is from and bait current actually make it a constitutional right that's that comes out. We already have a few questions lined up. I don't know if you want to take them now or we hear Professor Vijay Bhaskar first and maybe then we can stop after hearing you because that will tie up with further interpretation of the Dravidian model that might come out from your latest book as well that that you want to talk of and I think it'll be, it'll be good to put questions to you now and then perhaps put questions together. Thank you again. Dr Arielland for all your insights and I look forward to the answers later. There'll be questions on gender that has come up already. I could, I could possibly read some of the questions that it gives you some time to think while the other a panelist will put forward I think there is a question about sexual and gender identities, and how the Dravidian movement would evolve its ideology to guarantee its rights. A question from Yogeshji. I would request everyone to at least mention your affiliation when you put questions which helps us to understand your own background and the kind of questions that you're raising, whether it relates to any any kind of expertise as well. There's also another said the same person's question is how you would then define secularism and relate to the social development with secularism or the lack of it, given that you yourself. You're a religious person as well as a member of a secular party so it's really the question is about how you define secularism and relate the social development with secularism or the lack of it. There's an interesting question that then ties up with the issues of religion more generally, and how the British have played with religion in the formation of the nation, a large comment has come through along the same line about religion and administration of the national government. So I just leave it to, you know, there's also questions about education, public health, and the faculty of the Harriet to watch university, Sudhakar, which I might move to who has raised this question on the autonomy to save God education from the health sector question again to you, Dr. So if you think about these things and we come back to your answers after this, and that would be quite great. Dr. Vijay Bhaskar, if we can get on. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Sanjitha. And thanks to the physicians to show us for asking me to be on this imminent panel. It was good to see a lot of friends on this panel. Finally, yeah, thank you, Dr. Ellen, for laying out the broad contours of what we mean by the evidence model of development has been and I'm not going to elaborate on that at the moment, maybe I'll drop on it, you know, in between as I kind of go along. Yeah, to introduce yours is more to do with the developmental challenges. It is particularly about the post election phase. So that ties up with the theoretical model of development. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So before I get on to the set of developmental challenges that the state faces moving forward, I would like to highlight one aspect of the kind of importance of the need to move the frontier, you know, the terrain in which the politics is being kind of fought for, you know, I'll just kind of elaborate that in a moment. Just before the recent set of assembly elections. I was speaking to journalists who was based in Kerala. And at the point in time, it looked like the BJP may win Bengal, you know, so that was what it was looking like there's all this reports about you know that they're making a lot of waves and so on. And this journalist friend, he said that actually, I mean, be when he mentioned the assessment for Kerala and Tamil Nadu, he said that actually they're in that state of siege by this authoritarian major authoritarian wave from the North. And he was saying that there are not many people in Kerala seem to be kind of sensing it. So when the TMC's victory, you know, gave us a huge amount of breathing space, there was no two ways about it. And not only did it do that, it also highlighted the need for collaborative federal relations, you know, across state governments, not just to build a kind of a political alternative at the all India level. But even to secure some of the gains are some of the develop visible developmental gains that individual states have made as a result of you know state level progressive politics, you know, I think that is why it's important. But, however, as Suhas Palshika points out, you know, in the piece in the post elections, he says, while many people think that TMC's victory offers a fulcrum around which a credible alternative to a right wing can be built, he says, he actually sounds a warning saying that a similar kind of anticipation was there when the Mahagat Bandhan, you know, victory took place in Bihar in 2015 elections and then subsequently, you know, completely things changed. So he says, we actually want back to build a credible alternative in case if original parties have to come together, it's very, very important to have clarity on why they actually oppose the BJP. And often you find across several states, you won't find the clarity on the ideological plan on which they have to kind of contest the BJP, yeah. And here is where the Dravidian movement's opposition comes in as very, very significant and important because it has a very credible ideological basis in which it can, you know, contest the kind of Hindu right wing politics in terms of social justice or in terms of demand for greater autonomy. So, you know, however, we also know that to sustain this progressive politics, it has to kind of extend its frontiers, these kinds of principles have to kind of travel to other states, even to secure the kind of gains that the state has been able to make, you know, through the Dravidian mobilization. So two things here. So on the one hand, you know, we need the emergence of regional assertions and regional politics and place for greater autonomy being made by other states. At the same time, it's important that other states imbibe some of the key elements of the Dravidian politics if they actually want to come together to form a credible alternative. I think that's the key point that needs stressing in going forward. The second important reason as to why the terrain has to kind of shift outside, you know, but further away out of Tamil Nadu is also because Dravidian politics also offers a template for a lower caste mobilization, which actually democratizes, you know, development much more than you know what is possible in other states, which have also experienced lower caste mobilization, particularly in the Hindi heartline. Especially if you look at the recent work by Amitapujar, his point is that, you know, despite lower caste mobilization states like Bihar and UP, you don't find the kind of the politics of recognition translating into politics of distribution, the extent it has happened in Tamil Nadu. And one reason, which people like Jeff and others have found out is that often lower caste mobilization has essentially been based on specific caste lines. One, and two, often this mobilization has been based on valorizing of caste identities by, you know, by appeals to some kind of a mythical glorious past with all this caste sort of experience in the past. Now, the danger with that is, it fits in very well with this Hindu writing idea of, you know, celebrating your caste, according to your caste right and so on. So it can easily dovetail into a right to Hindu nationalist kind of politics. And this is where, again, the kind of lower caste mobilization that Dravidian politics made possible, and which could enable or resist the incursions of Hindu measurement politics, you know, offers lessons to build an alternative to the Hindu writing thing. I think on both these funds, I think it's important that the terrain of Dravidian politics moves outside Tamil Nadu to other states. That is an important lesson that the recent elections actually kind of brings forth. Now, coming to what is happening in terms of development challenges within Tamil Nadu. So, one, as we all know, Dravidian was pointing out, an important plan or the key plan on which social justice was emphasized was about ensuring or you know democratizing access to education and access to employment and the modern sectors and in the modern spheres. Yeah, through affirmative action policies and so on. And Tamil Nadu has made considerable progress in that front. For example, if you look at the new education policy, it kind of sets a target of transferring 50% of youth of ensuring at least 50% of youth attend higher education by 2035. But if you look at the latest Aishah report on higher education, you'll find that Tamil Nadu's more than 51% of Tamil Nadu's youth who have completed high school are already in some form of higher education at the other. Yeah, and this is also socially inclusive, be it in terms of task and be it in terms of gender. So, you know, in terms of broad basing, a huge Tamil Nadu's way ahead of, you know, most states in the country. However, the challenge that is emerging, which is a next generation challenge, but it's a very, very critical challenge is the unevenness in the kind of in excess education, primarily in terms of quality. The unevenness is visible in between children going to go out in schools and private schools, but either than either children going to schools in rural areas and urban areas and so on. The interesting thing is, though the learning outcomes in public schools are actually relatively better than in private schools, you find a greater privatization of education, both at the primary and the higher level over a period of time, happening. What happens is only a very, very small share of children attending government schools, the end of the professional education, be it engineering and medicine, because these are the groups that achieve better quality jobs. In fact, yesterday, the current government has passed the commission to look into reasons as to why it is so. But the issue is that a lot of institutions, apart from differences happening in school education, these are also getting amplified due to differences in the quality of education being offered at the tertiary level as well. So though Thamnada has the largest number of institutions within the top 100 in the national social ranking framework, what we find is that most of these institutions are in bigger cities and in metropolitan locations. Often higher education institutions and small towns and colleges, the standards are not adequate. So what happens is, if social justice is the primary, education is the key driver of social justice as the peer insurer of social justice, these differences undermines, you know, the kind of the extent to which social justice can actually go forward. So what this also has happened in the politics is, while these differences are driven by class, caste and spatial locations, often the inability to kind of acquire jobs, good quality jobs, describe access to higher education, you find them translating into some middle caste youth, you know, in the backward caste youth towards some of the limited mobility experienced by Dalit youth, which are more visible in the particular locality, you know, so that kind of split, because if you look at the success of every mobilization, in terms of ability to put together a block of heterogeneous lower class, then this kind of resentment clearly undermines the ability of the block to kind of sustain itself in the longer going forward. And a similar kind of divide, an opportunity to divide in the domain of education employment is the knowledge of English language. In a globalizing world, and in a world where most of the high end jobs are in the high end services sector, knowledge of soft skills, particularly spoken English has become a key window, you know, a key door for new opportunities in the labor market. And clearly that's again, you know, denied to large sections of youth who are kind of access to education. This translates into, again, you find this is again, this obviously divide is clearly visible in terms of lower caste versus upper elites. And also within lower caste, you find a huge difference between youth in big cities as opposed to smaller towns and rural areas. This is a new access of divide, which is again kind of kind of to kind of undermine the block that, you know, we I mentioned just earlier. And this inability to kind of negotiate this English speaking world of opportunities, translated into some kind of an investment, you know, some kind of a desire for a nostalgic Tamil past. In India, you find that kind of happening. And interestingly, this nostalgia for a Tamil past is not tied to this anti-cast politics that always, the different politics always invested this time identity with. Rather, it's about some kind of a well of tradition, where, you know, that is a kind of a validation of again caste based occupations and so on. And this is best represented by the success relative success of the non-Tamilate which the worship increased up to 6% from about less than 2% in 2016 erections. So this non-Tamilate, essentially, foregrounds his idea of Tamilness, which is in some sense a very precise Tamil identity, through caste lineage and so on, and often attributes the slippages in development that you see, because of Dravidian rule and which it says it is ruled by non-Tamils, essentially non-Tamil speaking things by, you know, members of this political parties. So it, you know, mobilizes around a strong appeal to return to Tamil natives traditions and so on, which can again, once again, easily feed into a Tamil Hindu identity and also politics of writing mobilization, which, of course, has to be kept within a Tamil idiom, you know, so it opens up that danger as well, you know, which is something going forward. The third point, I mean, how much more time do I have? Can I take a couple of minutes more? The third point that I'd like to highlight is the issues emerging from the logic of modernization itself. As Dr. Aidan pointed out, the key route to ensure social justice within Dravidian ethos is to ensure inclusive broad-based modernization, you know, ensure opportunities in this modern sector to people in lower class. Now, increasingly becoming evident globally that this ability of people to move out of agriculture into modern sectors, be it manufacturing and services, despite investments in education is not easily available to everybody in the sense that they're not enough enough employment opportunities, despite the modern sectors expanding, Tamil Nadu itself is a classic example. We've been able to move people out of agriculture much more than most major states in the country. And you're also able to give them education. And Tamil Nadu also has a state which has the highest share of employment outside agriculture, you know, both in manufacturing and services sector, despite that, you find a high degree of unemployment among educated youth. And this is not unique to Tamil Nadu. You find this happening in most parts of global south, and you also find that happening even in the global north as well. So this ability of modernization to actually deliver development through generating good quality employment is increasingly being called into question across the world. And again, going forward, while certain things can definitely be kind of addressed, the extent to which it can completely deliver the kind of, you know, the promise of inclusive modernization is something, you know, it's going to be a big challenge. Of course, we do have access to a global labor market and so on. But in the last few years, we know that even that is being kind of closed for various reasons, you know, across the price of nationalism across several countries and so on. My last point is about, it ties up a lot with what Dr. Edelman pointed out, which is about the erosion of subnational autonomy in the domain of policy making. New education policies clearly won. And again, the introduction of GST completely erodes the ability of states to actually resource to raise taxes. Often what you find when you look at central transfers, often these transfers are tied to specific programs and they know are always comes to certain kinds of conditions. And often these conditions are not in the best interests of the states. Yeah, that's another challenge, which it looks like it's only going to get worse in the years to come if not months. That is something that we need to end up working for. And another important domain is the changes to labor laws which have been initiated at the ordinary level with this new labor code bill. Now, some of this state, which has been able to sustain relatively higher wages in manufacturing and in both rural and urban areas across all sectors. And this labor loss and the relatively greater degree of social protection as well. And this new labor loss, the ability to kind of sustain these gains and improve this gains, again, you know, are being kind of called into question. And again, the farmers practice on this marketing loss, the agriculture products, various kinds of areas, you know, where these challenges kind of remain. And finally, again, which is partly due to logical modernization, the relationship between social justice and ecological justice. When you promote social justice primarily through modernization, the extent to which the challenges are posed by people who are kind of claiming for ecological justice can be kind of address is going to be the another major domain, you know, where we need to think in terms of policy making, and also articulating a different kind of a development imaginary where both these things can work together. With this section stop. Thank you so much, Professor Vijay Bhaskar to bring out, you know, very key points about as you say the development challenges, particularly post election, and also touching on some new legislations on labor, as well as the current climate crisis, which will obviously generate questions about how we integrate social justice with ecological justice and these are the kind of things that are going to be really the big challenges post corporate reconstruction. I would say that will play on the minds of the ordinary people, but I think from your presentation. You know the question of iniquity kind of looms large, and it seems to me that it's almost ironical that you know iniquity questions are stemming from a policy that aimed for broad access. So, you know, on the one hand you're trying to incorporate policies that are kind of over it all encompassing, and it's meant for a broader access to people, but at the same time it is generating all kinds of inequalities that are not necessarily about the projected aim of these policies, but how infrastructural developments or how investments have followed or how people have been able to access these these changes. So it's a long term thing that's obviously brought up it's not something that is short term that is generating this kind of grievance among caste groups. And therefore the question of inequality kind of pervades within cast whereas cast itself as a marker of inequality. So this is this kind of a double dynamics that is playing in Tamil Nadu's politics is quite interesting to bring out you know whether the Dravidian model of the government is able to therefore cope with these kind of new challenges opens up some further debates I think on the overall aim of access and the inherent nature of some kind of inequities that we are seeing. I think, having said that, there's a particular question from Kay Gopinathan, which is to bring it bring us back to the point on education. And it says the same how to how to bring equal educational syllabus to all students studying within Tamil Nadu, same like caste based system now quality education is slowly becoming accessible only to category of people with developed socio economic background. So the same kind of thing that you were saying that it is, it is accessible to certain, you know, some kind of socio economic background, even within within caste categories, perhaps. There's also. There's also a question from Yogesh again about professor brings up really important point but less often discussed that is about the rise of micro right Tamil nationalist parties that mostly pedal on exclusionism xenophobia and puritanism bordering on supremacist attitudes and what tools if any does the Dravidian movement have to deal with this. So really is this a question that's more ideological, or it is more a question that we can pin it to the development model itself. So, I think that the contradictions needs to be addressed here as well. We'll stop here and I, I can read the questions again, if you would like to take those now, Aril and and have any comments to make at this point. Thank you. You're waiting very, very patiently there for your observer comments. If you would like to say anything at this stage, then I would invite you I think there's already we've rolled on quite rich points and lots of discussions around, you know, the models of Sure, I mean I just wanted to say like I mean I'm actually mean like I have my identity as a Tamil Tamilian from Tamil Nadu, and now I'm in a situation where I proud to call myself as a non resident Tamilian. Previously, I used to like say and non resident Indian from Tamil Nadu with the current government coming into position like I mean like now I've got the unique identity which I'm really proud to call myself as I mainly wanted to join in as another fellow Tamilian sitting outside Tamil Nadu to know about like what I mean like I mean like when I was first introduced to politics, possibly in my teens, that's where like I always was mostly around the Dravidian parties, and that is all I knew. So I would have wanted to call myself as like I had a special interest in Dravidian politics, but I didn't like have the ideologies to go into detail. And having listened to Dr. Elin and Professor Vijay Bhaskar, I've kind of like now got a better understanding of the Dravidian models, and also like I mean I'm looking forward to see the future works from Professor Vijay Bhaskar about the challenges watch up in front of us. I'm really like I mean like really looking forward to it. Thanks a lot. Thank you. And Dr. Elin would you like to answer anything. Any questions. Yeah, the first question is, we're accommodating itself as a religious person in a secular party of DMK. So you should know the understanding the roots of DMK is offshoot from Dravidian Kedakam which is a rational association. And I myself a careerist based on rational principles or I would say an atheist, but you should understand the secularism understanding that the Indian Supreme Court and the secularism understanding by people of Tamil Nadu uniquely different. The Indian Supreme Court conveniently conveniently redefine secularism as an inclusion of all religions, but in Tamil Nadu, there's always been a private affair. I would like to take my election plan when I participated in elections. So few of my Indian friends, then back to my old videos where I do lecture classes from my cadres on scientific tempers rationalisms, and also to make them explain the various scriptures, which was responsible for demanding them. I was responsible for the superstitious beliefs. So they were edited, and they were doctored and it was widely circulated among the Twitter and Facebook pages, but it was a gift for me during the election flank. Because those type of rational ideas were very well very much imbibed within the Tamil society. They have to understand that I'm a non-partisan person or a non-religious biased person. So true secularism worked out well in my Thousand Lights constituency and I would like to congratulate in my fellow Indutva brothers for making a huge victory for me by their circulating my videos. That is Tamil Nadu lessons to offer. When I walked into each and every household in Tamil Nadu, especially in Chennai in Thousand Lights constituency, for them, Bungal is the same for all religions. Ramzan is same for all religions and Jesus Christmas is also same for all religions. Each one celebrates each one religion. They all find an occasion to join together. And it's completely a private affair regarding religion. It's a personal belief system. They never confuse religion into political sphere as they do very well in the North. But we're saying to certain done, we have to really draw lines because the observation made by Professor Vijay Bhaskar, especially in rural districts or especially western districts of Tamil Nadu, where the two elements are working on cast lines to making a cast structure identity, submitting the religious identity to break down this success stories. I think we have to again push again the broad based view of scientific temper education in all aspects because when Periyar took the path of social atheism where he wanted to eradicate caste, where he found caste, the root was religion. When the root of religion he founded by the presence of God or God belief systems reason, he went to the foci, just like a surgeon removing the tumor of first aid, instead of giving a parastomal tablet. But here on we have an educated mass where we can very well explain the scientific basis of human life evolution about origins of the world, origins of the universe to the younger generation, to the children and science should be taught with scientific temper. And that very well holds with Vijay Bhaskar's narration of improving the school syllabus. Yes, school syllabus should be in a form, especially science subject, especially in all underprivileged sections as well as government schools or government funded schools where science have to be taught with scientific temper. So those type of narration will help us for a better generation with human ethos and egalitarian values. So regarding Tamil Nadu, because DMK as you know it's a party of Sai whites, Vaishnavites, local deities, Christians, Muslims, as well as it's also placed for atheists like me also. So it's an inclusive party by soul. So the personal belief system is immaterial, the vulnerability of candidates determines how far he is able to handle the party system and how far he's able to campaign effectively to win an election. So that narration will be there. It will, it is going to be there. So that's answers my first question. The second question about the LGBT communities you should understand DMK is a party which has an option of evolving itself. In 2006 election manifest of DMK, it was the first government to introduce a vote for transgender. And it was during the DMK regime in 2006 they opened up volunteering sex correction surgeries in government general hospitals. And you know the DMK Rajasabha MP, the single member motion for transgender rights to identify themselves as a separate gender identities also from DMK. And I would congratulate my present chief minister, DMK leader, Mr. M. K. Stalin, who nominated a transgender, a Bharatanathian classical dancer into the developmental council, which is also a member of the council, which is equal to Nidhiya Kapi center, to take part in the planning process of the state. So, so the empowerment, we also have a elected council belonging to transgender community to participate also. So regarding LGBT rights and individual rights, yes, it's a long way to go. And DMK found its way to evolve, especially any type of oppression maybe, whether in the form of class or caste or gender, DMK has always been on the oppressive side and to fight for the oppressive side. That answers the second question. Any other questions? Yeah, I mean you don't have to categorically answer all the questions individually you can sort of club together some of the ideas in those questions, and if they are overlaps then we can extract, yeah, also extract from your answer some of the broader things that you've said. There is one question that I would like to raise at this point before we move on to political parties and mobilization issues. You know the Dravidian movement, this is another question from Sujan Vijay Raj, a STEM student, I think. And the question relates to the racial connotation given to the term Dravidian, and given that the Dravidian movement is visibly progressive in many spheres, how do Dravidian ideologues address this attitude despite it being scientifically discredited. Now with that I want to also, you know, raise this whole point about I think Professor Vijay Bhaskar, you did mention that this tendency for, you know, this kind of a Sanskritized way of actually, you know, relating to how caste identities are being manipulated, you know, whether this is kind of a populist mobilization that is going on with respect to religious religion and religious identity, especially you know how the BJP manages to win seats in this election, and how it's used religion therefore to gain that advantage, whereas the Dravidian movement is extremely scientifically rooted. Is this whole racial thing underpinning of this at all feeding into this kind of popular mobilization, maybe those two points can be, you know, clubbed together and answered. If you if you want to say anything on that. Yeah, if you want to say anything. This idea of this Dravidian identity being a racialized one. It has been many people, I mean, I've actually shown it's quite not the case. In fact, I mean, a famous quote, which people cite from Korea to discredit that kind of a reading is something like what we are says that anybody anywhere in the world who feels oppressed. If you read a marginalized tribe in Japan, or a community in the Arab world, anybody can be a part of, you know, this idea of being a Dravidian, anybody in the world who's oppressed is actually a Dravidian. You know, in a very, very broad reflexive sense, you know, in which he uses the term Dravidian. And if you look at the kind of politics that driven by the DMK and the other, all the parties have kind of professed, you can see that very clearly. Yeah, you know, I mean, I would be very hard to say that you know that they've used this idea for racialized identity to, you know, to talk about Dravidian sense of justice and so on. And in fact, if you look at some of the moves taken in the past to address inequalities, not all of them have been primarily through task based affirmative action. There are moves to introduce reservation for students who belong to a first generation students, you know, who are the first students in the households to enter into college. Or there was there was also moved to kind of affirmative action, a separate quota for students who go to government schools in rural areas. And of course, all those things I talked about earlier were shot down by the judiciary. So, this idea of social justice is a very, very reflexive one, you know, which continues to kind of, you know, respond to kind of, you know, changes that are taking place in the larger thing. So, you know, kind of see that as racialized and racial identity, you know, would be hard to that be hard claim to make, you know, go by whatever's going to happen so far. And that is why even this idea of this micro, right, this common nationalism that says that it is kind of problematic for similar reasons. Yeah, again, you're kind of investing it with a degree of essentialness. And you're saying you need to be a Tamil speaking caste, you know, because obviously, all of us speak Tamil, but you know, they also have the sense of, you know, certain costs of Tamil and some costs are not. So that division is hugely problematic. And that is one reason why, you know, this, this emergence of necessarily is right in Tamil nationalism can be problematic. Then to the first question that you kind of asked about this kind of unique what is the uniqueness of the kind of emerging. I think it's important to keep in mind that this is a work in progress. Yeah, I mean, and then when you say a work in progress, it's not even that you know, you start from point A and then they were very clear mission of value point B. And this process of moving from point A to point B, there are whole kinds of things happening simultaneously, not only within the state, but also at the pan Indian level and also the global level in terms of, you know, what kind of macro policies and so on. So it is a very reflexive process, but the key thing is like, for instance, if you look at the manifesto of the DMK of the selections, you'll find some of these issues are the promises of some of these issues being addressed by example learning outcomes looms large. And so does this issue of employment among educated youth. So, you know, so that is this, what shall I say, it's a process well kind of a movement. response to kind of changes that are taking place I think that's the best way to kind of understand this thing. So to that extent when you use the model I mean you know it's essentially it's actually it's meant to kind of indicate how you know how it's basically it's a method of escalation of the social change has taken place in Tamil Nadu social and political change and economic change taken place in the last 30 years. Yeah. And it's a model to the extent that it shows how lower class globalization can actually generate a little more inclusive. It's only in that sense it's not the closed kind of a system. It's not in that sense that anyone can understand. Yeah, I'll try to. Yeah, okay, very briefly, very briefly regarding that racial narrative. This is this these narratives are especially on critics of David and you should you should see the David is an umbrella word, rather than a racial word umbrella word which protects streams of temperature about a composite number of under the section. Then if you say David as racial you should say Scottish also is racial. Yeah, I think, you know, Dr. Naganate and while you're here I want to to bring a doctor, Jill Vernier if you're if you're with us. Could you could you then sort of you know, maybe now talk about the recomposition of the elites in the DMK, which is something that would then tie up nicely with the discussions we've had so far so that. Yeah, you're going to screen share. Thanks. So if we start on that and then we'll revisit some questions again. Okay, thank you very much. And thank you for the invitation. Thank you for the opportunity to be dating to be in the presence of real time and not expert when I'm a million external observer to make matter worse, based in daily. Here, where we collect data on state politics and we recently covered obviously the time in that election and so I'm going to show you some of the results of that effort. So, a key question in Indian electoral politics. This is something that we've already started discussing in this panel is the question of inclusion and political inclusion across the political spectrum within all major political parties. In India can afford not to claim to be inclusive to provide representation and therefore a measure of power sharing to a large array of groups. And Tamil Nadu and Dravidian politics are an interesting case to consider as they have adopted early a model of politics with inclusion as a premise, not just as a long term objective but as a base and a grammar for political action. And trust with the more outwardly elitist trajectory adopted by other states, particularly in the Hindi belt. So the question I want to ask you these what does the concept of political elite means then in a model that calls itself inclusive, and is there empirical evidence that we can use to question, and perhaps even show the limitations of that claim of inclusion. We can use data that you know was collected recently. This data and the presentation is a result of the work of several people, including Vignesh Karthik Rajamani was a doctoral student at King's College Pulary Bhaskar, who's a political science student at Ashoka, several of my colleagues at TCCP. I'll start with a few observations on representational patterns in Tamil Nadu assembly. I will then compare the profile of the DMK and ADMK MLAs over the past five elections. And then we look at a geography of caste in particular which will illustrate the relative stability of caste representational patterns in Tamil Nadu. And if time allows, I look at incovency data, data from that we coded on the political career trajectories of Tamil Nadu MLAs as a way to assess the degree of turnover renewal of political elite, but also as a measure of centralization of power within party apparatus. The data used by the way except for the caste data which is still under review is openly accessible. Right. So, everyone knows here that the Tamil Nadu assembly has been dominated by a variety of OBC groups, ever since Dravidian parties have started winning elections. The overall share of OBC representation in Tamil Nadu hasn't changed much in 50 years. It's an average at 72% of all the seats. There's a marginal decrease over a long period of time from 80% to 70% as a few non-OBC groups like the Nidus gained a little bit of representation, mostly in cities. But otherwise OBCs in Tamil Nadu have enjoyed a proportionate representation in the assembly. They roughly make 76% of the total population. So obviously, one needs to break down this category of OBC, which we do here in these charts. And what we have done is club a variety of individual caste or jatties into relevant broader sociological and political categories like pevas, gondas, moodyas, banyas, etc. So the gondar category for example, for instance, includes groups like the kongu velala gondas, the natu gondas, the woody gondas. The same goes for groups such as Tevas and banyas. So for those not familiar, these groups are agglomerates of various caste and subcasts. But for the sake of clarity, and because one can argue that these broader caste categories have a social and political meaning of their own, we club them into these entities. And so that helps us see a few distinctive trends in terms of OBC groups representation within the Tamil Nadu assembly. You see, for instance, that from 1971 to 2006, the banyas held the lion's share of seats in the Tamil Nadu assembly, but they started declining in the 90s. Tevas took the lead in 2011. At the time, more than one OBC and nearly out of four belong to that category. They have been over in the long term process of political empowerment through time via political representation until 2016 where their representation dropped when the ADMK won consecutive mandate. Among the scheduled tasks, which which are not represented here, parayas are by far the most represented across parties in 2016 in 2021, they made nearly 70% of all DMK and ADMK SC candidates and about 60% of all their MLAs. And the rest of SC representation within both parties is split between the Vendrakula Vellaga, 13%, Palas, Arun Dettias, 13% and 8%. So what I find to be common between those dominant groups is that they find representation across major parties. Another thing that we observe in other states of India as well, the key to long term cost empowerment and the key to long term cost representation is to find representation across major party rather than a line behind a specific party. So one of the basis of the claim of inclusion is that at least the two major Dravidian party cater to similar groups. So there is also a residual category of other OBCs, that is collection of smaller groups that are not connected to one another, sociologically, but they rose politically until 2011. So what we see broadly is that the backward or the OBC political landscape in Tamil Nadu is dominated by three major groups, Varnias, Tevas, Gondas, and that over the past 20 years or so there's been some change in the balance of power between these groups, partly linked to party performance but for other factors for other reasons as well. So I think to the swing character of elections in the state, the representation or fate of various groups could be tied to the electoral felicity of the two major Dravidian parties but actually as I've said before, these groups tend to be dominant because they are represented across parties. It doesn't really matter if the DMK or the ADMK, when those cast will still be ahead, they will remain ahead, and I'll provide a little bit more detail about that. And we see also that the geography of cast remains pretty stable over time. So we know that one of the basic tenets of Dravidian politics is its inclusive character, both the DMK and the ADMK claim and not without reasons that they provide representation to a broad array of groups historically united in their opposition to traditional upper-caste elites. So this colorful chart indicates that indeed, both party and here we see the DMK have ground to claim to be inclusive, right? Even if you can see a few groups, you know, standing out. Within the DMK for instance, Varnias, Tevas, and Gondas have a larger presence. They make nearly half of all the DMK MLAs in 2021. But what this chart shows you is that over five elections, regardless whether the DMK win or loses elections, it retains actually its inclusive character, right? So it's not a situation where the party retracts on the core base. That's more for the North Indian model. No, it retains that inclusive character, even if it loses an election badly, as it happened, say, in 2000. The ADMK charts look similar. There's a few differences. Over time, overall, sorry, the ADMK caters to a larger and larger array of dominant group, a larger array actually than the DMK. It tends also to win more reserved seats. There's a greater deletion representation within the ADMK compared to the DMK. But still, around 40% of the MLAs come from the same three groups, Tevas, Varnias, Gondas, right? And many other groups get representation, but you could argue that they get nominal representations, a few seats, right? So you do have, even if you have inclusion and diversity, you still have this balance of power within the political class. That picture, of course, is incomplete. We know that both parties add to their representation inclusiveness by roping in coalition or alliance partners. Many of those parties are caste-based formations to a certain extent, but not entirely. Diversity is also partly outsourced to junior alliance partners. The DMK tends to do that more in-reserved seats. It tends to distribute or allocate reserved seats to coalition partners more so than the ADMK, which partly explains why it actually has fewer SC MLAs from those seats. So as a result and in appearance, there's not one group in particular that seems to be dominating, right? Even though a small number of groups get a solid share of representation within both parties, it sort of oscillates between 40% to 50%, right? So that's MLA data, by the way. We also have nomination data for the candidates. I'm not showing it here for time, but also because it basically tells us the exact same thing. It literally does not look particularly different, right? And so if you look over, if you club, you know, MLAs elected over a period of 20 years, you see that these figures, you know, basically hold. Since 2001, 372 individuals have been elected on DMK tickets. 50 of them were Vanias, 41 were Tevas, 33 were Redalas, 28 were Gondas, and so forth. We see that the DMK also provides a fair representation to Nidals and intermediary costs to Dalits in a much lesser extent, and within those Dalits, most of them are Banias. Over five elections, only 14 Muslims have been elected on DMK tickets and only seven upper-casts MLAs have been elected. And the rest of the DMK's MLAs, 109 of them, are basically distributed across a wide range of smaller OBC groups. If you look at the ADMK, on the other hand, it won more elections, so it has won more seats. The larger groups tend to be similar, except that the largest group represented are the Dalits, followed by the Tevas, Gondas, Vanias, and so forth, right? Just like in the DMK, most of the ADMK's, the CMLAs are Banias. Another difference between the two parties is that over time, the share of dominant group representation slightly increases. It's not very obvious. It's not a very nice looking job, but it does sort of tell you that over time certain groups actually are ascending. Other groups are declining and those the group that are ascending within the ADMK tend to be from those dominant backward group among the OBCs. And the DMK chart is much more blurry, but which shows that things are actually more blurry within the DMK. We don't have a clear trend that particular type of groups actually are getting more representation over time. It's actually quite dynamic, right? So that's one part of the story. That's basically what emerges from party nomination practices, right? If you want to make more sense of it, you need to also consider geography. So what I've done here is plot the cast of the MLA on a map. It basically shows you where that OBCs dominate across the four, across sub regions in the States, and how various groups tend to be present on the map in clusters, right? You can spot colored clusters, you know, on the map. So it may not come out very clearly on the on the screen, but vaniers dominate in the Salem, Dharmapuri district, as well as in the Tanjavur, Thiruvavur, and Nagapatnam districts. Gondas are clustered in the western region, in and around the Erod, Coimbatore, Krishnagiri, Thirupu district, and the Nilgiris. Tevas are more present across the central, southern regions, in Tanjavur district, around Madurai, Bindigul, Virudunagar, Thirumilvili districts, and Mudiriyas are concentrated in the northern region, which includes Jinnak. So that's actually, it may sound tedious and you may wonder, you know, why is he, you know, enumerating this? But, you know, it's important because it tells you that cast competition at the constituency level is more likely to be intra-cast than inter-cast or between cast, right? All those major groups that I mentioned earlier tend to have geographical strongholds where parties tend to nominate candidates from similar background, right? And the result of that is that the geography of cast is quite stable. This is 2021 and this is 2016. So it's not quite exactly the same map. You can actually spot quite a few differences, but you can see that the geographical concentration of those clusters remain, you know, somewhat similar. And if you go back in time, the map actually would look fairly, fairly similar as well. And so that also tells us that the diversity that we find in electoral politics does not only come from the inclusive mindset of political parties, but also from the social demographic and reality that certain groups actually dominate subregions, localities, districts, and are so powerful locally that they necessarily get corrupted by different political parties, right? So the sources of inclusion may not just be an inclusive mindset, but it can also stem from hard reality entrenched into geography, right? The inclusive model of Dravidian politics, by the way, does not extend to women. This would make different presentation topic altogether. So I very quickly just say that both parties record in terms of women domination and representation is quite poor, that between the two of them, the DMK actually has a far worse record than the ADNK. As you can see here in 1991, generalitas rise to power saw the largest number of women elected in the Tamil Nadu Assembly, 32, 27 alone from the ADNK. And that women representation within the ADNK sort of declined subsequently, but the DMK never really caught up. If you look at the 2021 elections, women made only 6% or 5.6% of the DMK Alliance candidates, only 4.4% of their MADs, the ADNK did better, but quite frankly, not much better. So now what I have done so far is kind of a cast head counting exercise, and that may seem a little bit abstract. Descriptive representation is important, but individuals of course matter as well. And so there is a trend in India across political parties towards centralization of decision making processes, a hollowing of party apparatus to the benefit of the servicing of strong leader figures who use their prerogatives to entrench their control over party organizations. And there are two measures that we can use to assess the degree of centralization of control within parties, ticket distribution practices, and individual incumbency or the ability of MLAs to secure the re-election by getting a ticket to rerun in the first place. And so we have coded individual incumbency at TCPD, and what it shows for Tamil Nadu here is that over time only a small number of MLAs get to rerun to get a consecutive term, that's the blue column, that's the ratio of re-running incumbency. That basically tells you that with two exceptions since 1991, a majority of MLAs don't even get to rerun or don't even get a chance to win a consecutive term. And in orange, it's basically the strike rate of the rerunning incumbency, so in 2021, less than half of MLAs, sitting MLAs contested, and slightly more than half of them actually won their seat. So technically speaking, it basically tells you that if you were elected in 2016, you had more or less 25% chance of getting re-elected in 2021, right? And so as a result, most MLAs in the Tamil Nadu Assembly are first-time MLAs. You see it's a huge number, and you can see, so the y-axis is a number of terms served by MLAs, right? So one gentleman served 10 times, another gentleman served nine times, two gentlemen served seven times, and I'm saying gentlemen because there are all men, right? Among all those, actually 46 MLAs in the current assembly who have served more than three terms, there are only two women, right? So that leads me to another measure of public concentration. That's what I call the stable political class. Anyone elected three times or more in a given assembly is a professional politician, someone who can actually beat party incumbency, which we know is quite strong in Tamil Nadu politics. And so what you see in this chart is that the number of MLAs were serving for the third time or more is actually very small, 46 people. Most of them are in the DMK, 29 of them, 11 of them are in the ADMK. The figure in the square are the number of terms that they have served, right? And if you cross that data with the cost data that I showed before, you will see that the dominant group that tends to be more represented or largely represented in the assembly are even more overrepresented within that category of professional lasting politicians. Those who have close connections with party leadership, those who hold important position within the party apparatus, those who hold sway over their constituency for a variety of reasons. And so if you look at the data over the past 20 years, we see that MLAs from the devas, vanias, gondas communities are more likely to make longer political carriers, while the others are more likely to basically be ejected after one term, either by their own party, and if they get a chance to rerun, you know, in many cases by voters themselves. Right. And so that also shows the benefit of having more individual from your group within your party, within your party, you can build a faction, you can use, you know, cost influence to secure your position, but that's something that Andrew Wyatt would be far more competent than me to talk about. And this is something similar. This is basically data that shows you that, you know, this is the number of 2016 MLAs and how many of them actually rerun. What it shows you is that those who belong to dominant VC groups are far more likely to rerun than SC MLAs. Right. If you look actually here in the DMK, there are no ACs among those who won more than three times. Right. This is where the rotation really, really takes place. Right. So to conclude, a couple of observations. Let us about Dravidian politics. Two things essentially. One, the Dravidian register does not bypass caste fully. You know, despite the discourse on inclusion, despite the discourse on, you know, backward cast of caste solidarity inherited from the past, cast remains a salient feature of electoral politics. It also reposes on the stability of patterns of local dominance. It also reposes on the political relegation of non-dominant groups that there are limitations. That's the reason why you have such a proliferation of small cast based parties. It's precisely because there's a number of group who cannot find a space or space within Dravidian parties. That's something Andrew Wyatt has written extensively about. And true, the resilience of caste is sustained by a number of factors, including the fact that those dominant obesity groups don't really have to compete too fiercely against one another, because they contest in different parts of the state in different regions and sub regions. Right. That of course fosters backward unity. It doesn't means that members from those groups don't have to, you know, pit against one another. That also helps to build this sort of surface of, surface of unity. In other words, and then third or last observation, there are important limits to inclusion of Dravidian politics as a large number of groups that do not get included and women in particular don't seem to get included in either Dravidian parties. So in other words, Dravidian parties can practice caste politics, but without having to talk about it, they can still use general registers of mobilizations. welfare, social policy, regional identity, the North to mobilize voters while anchoring their electoral strategy, candidate selection and so forth in according to local caste calculations. Because the landscape is extremely, because of strategy. Hello. Yeah, actually, I was, I held up in a small minute, could you repeat the question please. Yeah, I'm done literally intense against. I probably want to respond to something that you've raised. I'm actually, I'm actually done. Right. Yeah, I can stop here actually. I think more or less you've concluded the main points about, you know, but one thing that I noticed from the presentation is that the DMK has got the category of the DMK was what 14%. And that was, that was quite high, I thought, in comparison to the DMK. So I just wondered whether what what how would you learn talk about the OBC mobilization within the DMK at this moment. Actually, in coming to ideology politics and electoral politics, each political party has to find an equal representation depending upon the numbers, especially to win an Indian democratic election. And that has forced each political party to take a stand to have a representation and assimilation of communities from understanding the Tamil Nadu, OBC and AC structure. So if you're able to see there are traditional DMK would banks and traditional ad code banks that difference we have to understand. If you feel the northern part of Tamil Nadu, which, which presents the composites of one years and among the population for years, if you feel there's a strong plank still remaining, we're able to take this color for the past, say from 70s onwards till now. If you see the Congo region, which is a composite of founders and sub-Arunandias, which also belongs to the category, but traditionally where ADM case would bank. And after advent of caste dynamics play a stronger role. There are a lot of representation of Davis in ADM case. So if you see the analysis of ADM representation be more of Davis, Gounders and Arunandir population. And if you see more of pallors, one years and barriers of DM case would bank. If this analysis is being extrapolated, you'll able to see that the strong would banks, especially in these bills. Apart from that, if you take Cusp constituency, suppose for example, you take Chennai or any metropolitan, which is a composite of all caste and communities, there won't be a strong caste factor playing the role in giving tickets to candidates. That's why you see a lot of leaders belonging to minority communities, religious minorities, as well as atheists like me were able to participate in the election in regarding Chennai ground. So what has made this entire process you have to understand that ADMK and DMK in order to win an electoral process have started in a, what is in a competition type of thing to give representation to backward class mobilization and AC mobilization depending upon the population figures based in Tamil Nadu. We have to again thank constitutionally Dr. Ambedkar for registering the one third proportional composition for the communities where by default both ADMK and DMK have to give through the reserve communities. So that has number has been fixed regarding the OBC mobilization, the traditional wood banks are now a sort of, what do you say it is getting mixed up. For example, after 90s, after advent of isolated one year party like Patalimakal Kachri or isolated predominant public proposition of even if they say it's a composite one, those alliances also played a role of the one year representation in ADMK and DMK. Alliance of PMK in ADMK and alliance of PMK with DMK and the proportionate of one year representation in each and every party post 90s especially this was led. There's a good observation if you're able to find in 2021 election the present election. The traditional Arunandir vote base which was ADMK's vote base switched over to DMK this time. If you're able to study the CBNAT study by Hindu, if you're able to see the caste analysis among the SC population and the Arunandir population, there's a huge chunk of migration of votes which were traditional wood banks of ADMK with switched to DMK. You know why? Because of inner reservation policy by DMK. They gave inner reservation among the schedule caste among the Arunandir. So many people got educated, educationally empowered. So if you're able to see the traditional wood bank system is like an assimilation of OBCs because the predominant population here has been OBCs. And the representation according to confirmed constitutionally by Dr. Ambedkar's intervention. Coming to the women's representation, see women's representation I understand we have a long way to go. We have a long way to go regarding legislatures. But you should also understand it was DMK who introduced the 33% reservation in local body elections for women. It is a step by step by step evolution. Yeah, it's evolution. So we need to have more women representation that the party has to evolve on that. I understand the limitations here, definitely. No, no, thank you. And actually I think we agree on most things. There are examples, you know, Navin Patnik increased drastically the number of tickets to women candidate. Mantha Banerjee also did it in the last general election. So it's just a matter of political will to actually do it. Yeah, I think there is a question that is again tied to the whole question of Dalit representation and emancipation and how the DMK would actually respond to it. I mean, we have seen Errol and actually talk of it briefly right now. There is another point that's emerging on the suffering of Tamils in Sri Lanka, which is, I think another session another panel probably on in this context but I would really like Andrew to step in and perhaps sort of, you know, touch on the whole of religion, which, which is something that should come out from this whole discussion of caste that that is extremely elaborately done by you, Jill, and I just feel that you know we have, we have got a very complex picture which looks as if you know the caste competition is is fairly simple, but we can see how it plays out electorally and the geography is also interesting and it seems to me that some things don't move at all. And perhaps the explanation of the geography can then be tied to the opportunities that are coming up in certain pockets of Tamil Nadu. And especially the role of private capital and how you know private capital plays out for these kind of caste mobilizations which appear to me quite static and the figures are rising in the ADM case slot as well as the DMK slot but it doesn't seem to me to be rising as sharply as the progress in the development of capital is so there you know the whole point of inequity that we were talking about earlier, therefore exactly kind of ties up with with the same kind of you know that there's a stability of some caste positions, and that is being reflected electorally as well within within party politics, and that kind of ties up with the questions of, you know, opportunities privilege inequalities, and hence the question of pride politics playing in different states. And I think which a busker was saying you know you have to look at the larger picture of India, as well as global politics and I feel the social narrative of of pride, which is kind of replay, even entering caste politics is reflective of these kind of static pictures that are also emerging. So you know some people feel left out as you said you know very small cast groups geographically are quite scattered and so they keep gaining position, and whether these pockets of small cast groups are there for able to galvanize in a different way or getting attracted to the to religion on platter is what I'm thinking now that you know, these lower cast groups that are so fragmented are then are then probably flexible enough to be attracted to religion. So what is the role of religion in caste mobilization. So can we just turn to Andrew and and see if there is any answer coming from the expected, but I'm just hoping there will be some. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your interventions. And I'll see you soon. Bye. Yeah, over to you. So thank you, thank you so much, Sanjit and Dharanidharan for organizing the event. Is this your slide just to just come up. You've stopped sharing. Okay, that's fine. Yeah, should be there. I have to apologize for deviating from the title so I don't have a huge amount say about religion but I'll say a little bit. I think I'm quite brief. As well about what I think the significance of the election is that it's just passed. First is just to remind everybody that that come not actually did have a significant political crisis in 2018, 2019. It wasn't clear how the ADM K was going to be led. And I think what the election shows in the sense that that the crisis is as asked, that you probably plan on some he showed himself to be, you know, a competent Chief Minister and leader of the party as well. And so the sort of doubts that people had, you know, with the AI, a DMK survive is that question has kind of gone away for the moment. Likewise, the election is very important for the DMK I mean it suffered a very bad defeat in 2011. Usually, it didn't win back power in 2016. And then there's a big question for MK Stalin. And, you know, he will be very satisfied with how the election just just just completed. So, in a sense, we kind of have a sort of turned back to political stability. What I would say is that the election was very competitive and more competitive perhaps and people thought a lot of people thought the DMK would win very easily. It was tighter than people thought and it's worth just emphasizing what that means in terms of parties for France contested the election. Okay, only two of them actually won seats. In them, they included 36 political parties. And then I think there are two other parties that we want to talk about as well so that I mean that is a phenomenally large number of parties. What, you know, why does this happen? And why does it matter? I think it matters because the existing political parties, the Dravidian political parties, while they're very effective at winning elections, they're not completely talking to all of the needs of the wider population or people that are not incorporated. This means amongst the electorate, but it also means amongst ambitious politicians that they sometimes come to the conclusion that maybe they will be more successful to go it alone. And partly it's fed by the structure of alliance politics that if you can demonstrate that you have a certain level of support by going alone in a subsequent election, maybe you'll get a place in an alliance and you'll get a few seats in the assembly and so on. Overall, I think what I want to emphasize is that there's a degree of pluralism in the political system in Tamil Nadu. Narendra Sudmaniam has written about this in a really interesting way in his book about ethnicity and mobilization. And I think it's interesting that that trend is still there at a time in which we see pluralism shrinking in other parts of India. So I think the Tamil case is a really interesting one. I wanted to say something about the elite of the DMK and I'm talking about the DMK because they won the election and so in that sense we get a kind of more significant and interesting outcome. It builds a lot on what Sheila said. I think his point about the stable political class about incumbency is really important that those diagrams are really insightful and really, really interesting. What I would say is, when she talks about that stable political class people that have won three elections or more. What's really interesting is that these political figures find their way into the cabinet so that the well experienced political district secretaries and so on are well represented. If you look at the cabinet at the moment, it doesn't actually look in many ways that very different from the cabinet 10 years ago. Yes, there are new faces, but the senior cabinet ministers were cabinet ministers back in in 2011. The big difference of course that Stalin is the key minister, but you still have those kind of really important kind of heavy weights there, which is why I've put the kind of new cabinet in inverted commas. And then just to follow up on what Sheila said, in terms of representation. There are only two women out of 34 cabinet ministers and if my count is correct. There are only three dollars out of 34 and in terms of the order of precedence they're pretty well towards the bottom of it so it's. It's not a new trend, but the trend continues. The other thing that that's really interesting for me is the background of the candidates and again, the focus here is on the DMK. And this is not the people who are elected but it's the people that contested. And if you look at the occupational profile. What's to be expected is that agriculture is very important and in 2011 nearly half of candidates said that they had some kind of connection about culture. Of course, they're all politicians as well. And there's kind of curiosity here and how they report that they're occupations but I think what is interesting is that there are connections with different sectors of the economy. What we're seeing here is not a very diverse group of people and what for me is very interesting is the way in which business has become more important as an area of activity in which politicians engage and in 2011 about a third said that they had a connection with business in 2021. It was nearly half 44% said that they had a connection with business. What I will also emphasize is that people do not always disclose that business connections and so the figure actually in 2000 and was well over 50%. Very often senior politicians hope that they own engineering colleges and they don't declare that they just registered themselves as social workers. I think it's safe to say in 2021 that the figure that the number of people involved in business will be will be higher again. Once we kind of drill down into the data a little bit more. So, for me that's really interesting that a lot of politicians have a double triple career is in agriculture and politics and business. And there is a kind of nexus there that I think needs to be kind of unpacked a little bit more in scholarly work to think about the ways in which having a career in politics is also good for building a business career. And that's all I'm going to say for a moment, but thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. Thank you. Yeah, and that's that's very, you know that that's that's very revealing. I feel that you know we're looking at a new kinds of opportunities probably arising from the agricultural kind of, you know, the trend that is in a climate that is happening at a time and the kind of farmers movement and protest that is happening in the north of India, Professor Vijay Bhaskar you've talked extensively about the rural and the urban linkages. And now it emerges from Andrews paper that you know that, and there is there is a real growth of agricultural entrepreneurs who are having to contribute into this kind of political climate as well as the seeds and and our MLAs as well. So is there is there this in this is something to be teased out as Andrew says that you know we, we need to really look at what is going on in terms of the strength of this particular business community and also Jill I wanted to then ask if that the growth of this kind of an entrepreneurial class in in the in the political scenario then matches with particular cast groups as well that are engaged with agricultural businesses and investments, and who are the people who are there for gaining that upper hand, and are contributing to this political stable class that you mentioned. I think this will also tie up later, I bet there are neither ends intervention with you know you're you're going to bring in that kind of perspective, given your background in public policy and management, whether this this new entrepreneurial innovation to enter politics is coming from a from a way of managing certain traditional sectors as we call it, you know agriculture is more kind of a traditional sector and whether new management practices new kind of industries are emerging from your own sort of feel and your own experience of public policy, as well as program management that you're in will go to go to that later. Do you have anything to add here from your own experience medical sector is very small it's only what 2% probably we saw a kind of there's not much intervention but I don't think there is anybody who's done similar analysis for another state to see if there is an increased presence of the, the more kind of established professional classes the lawyers, the medical sector in politics there hasn't been those kind of, I mean the lawyers are quite powerful say in Bengal, we've seen lots of participation from there but I don't know the figures off of the top of my head to quote for Bengal I mean probably do you have anything to say. I mean all I wanted to say sorry when just talking about the professional input I mean like only lately I think we are seeing like more professionals like coming into the respectives. I mean one other important person not to be forgotten in this discussion will be the financial minister current financial minister who's been like appointed by our chief minister that can't be like no one like who could replace him in the especially when it is goes on to the central government discussions I mean like those have been quite a dynamic discussions. And like we were also like, I mean like we shouldn't ignore the fact that like last time the health minister was a medical professional himself. So I think like lately the trend is coming up like I mean like I'm looking forward to more of these happening because I mean I don't have comparisons in the other states, but like definitely for Tamil Nadu this is a new trend which has been set up. And then like also like it was quite interesting to hear from Prof. Giles about how the economic like background situations were like put in together about the professional background how the variation in and then how the ties in with their kind of entrepreneurship like what they kind of like disclose or not disclose. So there are a lot more kind of like which are hidden factors. I'm sure the like the more professionals like who come forward into it like that will be like more forward like way off as going towards. Thank you. That's that that's great. I think there's a there's an interesting question that that again, you know, touches on Professor Husker's last point about ecological justice and I just have this feeling that the intervention from the agrarian sector will also tie up with questions of ecological justice and how some some kinds of entrepreneurship from the agrarian sector also merges with the newer developments of on environmental politics as well. So the greening of electoral politics in terms of environment oriented. How is it that these are, you know, if these can be seen as clear trends in new political parties or the kind of people who are getting involved. So this question comes from Professor Emeritus, Nadirajah Srisakandirajah, who's Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and I think it kind of, you know ties up well with which a basket point. There's another emergence of another point from an anonymous person here on the emergence of the Namthamilar Kachi complicate the Dravidian mobilization. And do you think that NTK has hit its peak and would continue to stay as is or grow further there isn't a particular question to a particular panelist so I would open this up to anybody would like to answer. And, and, and let's let's sort of, you know, have some quick points, Vijay Bhaskar would you like to say anything to the points that Andrew raised and the questions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, thank you, Andrew. That's very interesting the fact that, you know, many of them report agriculture as their major source of income. I will be surprised if actually agriculture constitutes a major share of their income. Clearly, I think the bulk of the income should come from businesses. Yeah. And we do know, I mean, two things one is that the expenditure, election expenditure, you know, at the national level has been increasing enormously since the 1990s. Clearly, it's very obvious that only candidates with certain amount of money power and actually contest elections yeah that has become very clear, that is one. And second, you also know that if you look at the kind of generation at the all India level. Yes, this mission is essentially taken place in what are known as rental sectors, yeah sectors where you derive money by controlling scarce resources and generating rents from that. Yeah. And obviously that kind of control over the sectors come from proximity to political decision making. There must be two of all parties, you know, real estate for example I mean you know, it will be very hard to come across real estate lobby which is not very closely tied to political parties at this juncture. I think that's, you know, it's because of the agriculture thing is something you know I kind of find it hard to be able to compare that they have lands, whether that one suits a big source of income or something it would be surprising for this really true. On the question of this greening of politics. So one note of caution I would like to raise here is we know green can also be saffron, yeah can also go and you're seeing how environmental movements at the all India level have also been supposed with the large degree of saffron. So at that extent, even this, the greening, you know, you also see this tendency here to look at this organic farm movement in Tamil Nadu as well. That is this tie up to this idea of going back to pure Tamil way of farming and so on. Yeah, if I'm not the majoritarian kind of this thing but you know it's also tied to this idea of going back to developing traditional varieties of seeds, recovering traditional ways of farming, and so on, which might be also tied to politics of revival of an essentially kind of identities which I think we need to watch out for. And I'm afraid that the non Tamil country tends to represent that dimension of the greening of politics. I'll just stop. That's great. Andrew, would you like to add anything to add something. Yeah. So there's an interesting book written by Yuria Khajeh, Professor Tianspo, she wrote this book called price of democracy. She observes that price of the cost of fighting elections has been rising everywhere across the world, not just India but most of the countries, the countries do not have proper reforms. She says the example of India, sorry of US, Germany and even France, and she says the last 30 years is rising by more than 300% percent. That's where we have politicians like Trump, who are able to become presidents and she also proposes that election funding should be public. And how we model it is a question but that's that's what the book this is about. So I just wanted to add this in. Joe, did you want to say anything on this, you know, cast lines. So on the complex relation between environmentalism and politics, I'm reminded that in 2014, the two candidates who had the highest number of criminal cases against them were two candidates from Tamil Nadu from Amadbhi party, Mr. Uday Kumar, who both of them are green activists, you know, figure and leading leaders of the protest movement against you know the Kudankulam nuclear reactor, a leader of the anti-stellar corporate industry movement, and so forth. I think there's still a very long way for environmentalism and electoral politics in India to sort of, you know, become friendlier than they have been. Now on the question of, you know, this business of business in politics, I think we need to make distinctions between several very different kinds of processes. On the one hand, the story of, you know, cast group turning entrepreneurial, acquiring greater position within trade networks and building a political identity and using that as a vehicle for political empowerment has long been documented. I noticed that Professor Barbara Harris White is in the audience and she has written extensively about that. The second distinction that needs to be made is between the rise of a new class of entrepreneurial professional politicians, which tends to get a lot of media attention because of access because also their new character and but are still, you know, few in number, especially compared to this other larger category of business grounded politicians, people who invest in a political career to further some form of private interests, which can be individual which can be group based which can be a crosscast I mean it can take a whole source of configuration and we usually come from sectors of the economy that are close to the state are regulated by the state where you need licenses and rely on public contracts where sectors of the economy that also tend to be criminalized. And that's me talking with my top dash lens here. And, and also very competitive. Right. And if you add that with what Daniella and said about another rising costs of the cost of entry into politics. There are structural incentives for people who have the resources to get into politics to get in. There's a selection bias is a selection effect. But there's also the production of incentives to sort of use and misuse these positions to further some form of private interest. And I'm not, I can't speak for Tamil Nadu, but I can speak for other states and not Indian states. These are usually your fly by night politicians. They invest into politics to get an active, try their best to make the most of it and then they usually quickly disappear. Yeah, I think I think that was, you know, earlier we did talk a little bit I think Professor Vijay Bhaskar you, you kind of raised the point about affirmative action in the in state and there's a, there's a great amount of reduction in the public sector. So, and it's been further eroded. And I think these kind of measures, as well as the new education policy which is trying to club together these various costs under one kind of group. And all this is also going to play into how the representation within parties would, would, would also shift and change, because there is a tendency to, to kind of almost equate the suffering of a Dalit or a woman with the suffering of everybody. And it just seems to me that you know the new education policies is trying to bring things together and club everything together. And similarly, the whole issue of the state not being able to take control of affirmative action is, is going to have impacts on how cost mobilization will play out, eventually, as well. So, so I think that the national level policies are, you know, are obviously in dialogue with what is happening on the state level. But at the same time, we are looking at various fluxes in different quarters, whether it's smaller groups, smaller cost groups or the changing nature of entrepreneurship in political parties, which is, which is coming out from Andrews paper. And that ties up with the erosion generally of the public sector and employment opportunities. So it's, it kind of criss-crosses with that. Do you have anything more to add to employment and, and cost issues? Except to say, yeah, not really except to say that affirmative action is the mind itself has become extremely restricted with this decline in partnership with employment. There are no two ways about it. So now, affirmative action essentially is in terms of education. And that's why I think the problems of differences in quality at the primary level, on the national level, is likely to make a big difference. If we don't address that distinction, this is going to kind of, you know, create new access of inequality. And as you rightly said, it is, of course, yes, there's a difference between backward tasks and nullits. But importantly, there are classes within all these tasks. Yeah. There are really set across all these tasks who are likely to get a benefit from what has happened in the last 20 years, depending on this employment and reduce the affirmative action. So that is kind of opening access of inequality. And it's happening in all other states as well. But despite all this, you will find that the gap between, in rural Tamil Nadu, you find the reduction in the inequalities between the nullits and other tasks. In the urban Tamil Nadu, the gap between the nullits and backward tasks in one hand and between backward tasks and backward tasks in the other hand, it's something that's kind of his purses state. You would expect that to kind of come down because of affirmative action policies and so on, but you don't find that happening as much as one would expect. And that has to do with what has happened in post 1990s in terms of the kind of skill sets, you know, that the labor market kind of was brought from the demand and so on. Jill, if you want to add something before we move to the next of the final paper and wrap up conversation. Yeah. There was a question on the NTK. The NTK is quite an interesting party in India that actually gives 50% of women candidates. It's done so in two consecutive elections and it's quite unique and it deserves to be mentioned. It's still a fairly localized phenomenon and they have grown, they have got, you know, substantial votes here, but they are growing in what you could call a residual space of electoral politics in Tamil Nadu. So as such, I don't see them as having a lot of major effect on on Dravidian politics per se or on electoral politics between major players. They basically have two directions in front of them, either they basically stay on the side of the road and do their things and they will probably plateau and may have plateaued already, only the future will tell us. Or they get into the game of negotiations with Dravidian parties become part of coalitions and and they sort of beg their performance to electoral alliances, which I'm not quite sure that something that they would do right now. But it is an interesting phenomenon and in the gender aspect shows that, you know, courageous decisions don't always come for where you expect them to come. That's great. Thank you. So maybe on that note, let's turn to the future, the past, present and future of Dravidian ideology I think it kind of ties up very well with some assumptions that we have and perhaps some speculations from you. Selvam Dharani Dharam, the co founder of Oxford Policy Advisory Group, you want to do your session now. If you have a PowerPoint or anything to share. No, no, no PowerPoint. Yeah. Good evening to everyone. Firstly, I would like to thank Prabhu, USL and SOS for organizing this fantastic panel discussion. And, you know, it's always very difficult when the last speaker, because such a great panel because most of the things that I want to speak are spoken. So I'll try to avoid urgency but still if I repeat my apologies. I think the futurist vision is quite important to just wrap things up. We've had quite a lot of. So, anyways, I'll just go about four parts. So initially I want to talk about the election results briefly, and then talk about reasons for the failure of the right wing nationalist movement in Tamil Nadu. And third thing would be was to why the SPs and the BSPs and the RJDs failed in comparison to the Dravidian parties. And fourth, the future of the movement as well as threat to the movement. So the one two and three would kind of also talk about the past and the present. Well, see the selection was an important election for the Dravidian movement. So realistically, DMK is the only Dravidian party at present. I think ADM had been slowly leaving his Dravidian tag and now with alliance with Modi and the kind of policy that happened from 17 to 21, and with no real Dravidian leader. I don't think ADMK is any more the Dravidian party. So DMK is only the Dravidian party. So for Dravidians to succeed, DMK has to succeed. So DMK has not been in power for the last 10 years. So it had to definitely win the selections probably if it couldn't afford to lose the election for the third time. ADMK being a party of personalities without a personality like Amma, MGR and anti-incumbency, they were not the favorites, but still, you know, alliance with BJP and how the institutions are losing the autonomy and the money power and the issues on which it was fought on is definitely an easy election. For example, it was fought on religious fundamentalism in which the Velyatra was taken, Murugan is a Tamil guard and they're also trying to mobilize the Hindus together. And then there was Tamil fundamentalism of the NTK. So though NTK is opposed to BJP, but kind of they kind of discredit the Dravidian movement, so which in turn helped the Hindu mobilization. So if you kind of discredit the Dravidian, the Dravidianism, then BJP is the only gainer. And second also, we had Makkal Nidhi MNM, which was also against the BJP, but still was kind of discrediting the Dravidian parties and corruption and so on and so forth. And third, there was caste fundamentalism. There were three issues here. First, there was reservation given to Vaniyas. So there was mobilization of Vaniyas and plus because the chief minister candidate was a Gounder, there was mobilization of Gounder voters. And third, also because of the development among the Dalits, there was an insecurity among the Vaniyas as well as some rough patches with certain subcast within the Gounder community. So these were the issues. So people thought it should be a swing election like Mr. Andrew White said, but it was clearly not. DMK managed to get 159 and the Dalits together. DMK got about 133. Surprisingly, DMK's alliance partners, Congress and BCK got about 65 to 75% except for CPI, CPIM, all the alliances they built. For ADMK, if you look, ADMK did really well. Only the alliances left them down. For example, BJP and PMK, they contested about 40 seats together and just won eight, so about 20%. And also, if you look, the odd difference between DMK and ADMK is only 6%, but if you look at the closer picture, in DMK gained all over Tamil Nadu, but ADMK lost everywhere except the Kongu belt. So for example, though the victory margins in North, Central and other parts of Tamil Nadu was about 9 to 10% for the DMK plus 10% for DMK, ADMK only managed to gain in the West Tamil Nadu. So if you remove election results in West Tamil Nadu, I would definitely see it as an election in which DMK wanted left, right and down. So this comes to an interesting inference that is ADMK going to be a regional party, a party that's going to mobilize only founders and going to have presence only in the western region. So with the friction of OPS and EPS, like the chief minister and the deputy chief of ADMK, so if the deputy chief minister kind of let's say moves away from ADMK or starts his own party or merges with the BJP, there is a clear risk that ADMK would only be a regional party with presence in West. If that happens, then there are also chances for right wing mobilization or for BJP to come to power in Tamil Nadu. So apart from that, let me go further into why did right wing women fail in Tamil Nadu as of now. So even in West Bengal, they are supposed to reckon with but here if you look 2001, 2021, 2001 they got about three or four MLAs, the BJP that's in partnership with DMK and now we are four in partnership with ADMK. So there is no increase in woodshed. This has not happened anywhere, maybe slightly in Kerala but apart from that, Tamil Nadu I would say is unique. The reason being I would say is because of the equitable growth and also if you look also BJP plays regional politics, let's say they go in Uttar Pradesh and kill someone because of an assumption that he's carrying beef meat. And again the same time, the same BJP Chief Minister in Goa goes and protests because there is no good beef available. Same thing in Northeast. Also you see now BJP is protesting in Tamil Nadu saying that alcohol shops should be closed and they want to open alcohol shops in Lakshadhi. So these kind of incoherent statements of work and how they try to do it is to hypnotize masses using fake news misinformation and then Hindu mythology and then again creating xenophobia against a specific religion. So why it doesn't work in Tamil Nadu is mainly because of equitable growth. So I've lived across India from Delhi to Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and traveled across India. The critical thinking and education is primary education is very high in Tamil Nadu and plus the internet penetration of 70% is one of the highest in India. So because of that the flow of information happens really fast. If there is a fake news and immediately within few minutes the DMK party is able to respond to the same. So that's one reason. So I would say the growth enabled by the revisionism has been helping the revisionism to sustain. So maybe you can ask why other states not able to do this. So that's something I'll come in later part of my essays. But again if you look the growth of Tamil Nadu is very unique. So Tamil Nadu is the only state in which there's achieved success in both socio-economic development as well as in industrial growth. If you look at Kerala, they're number one in all the socio-economic metrics. If you take Gujarat or Maharashtra, they're number one in industrial growth. But if you take a state which has come in the top three in both, it's only Tamil Nadu. So even within industrial development if you look, Tamil Nadu is the only region where the industrial news are spatially spread out. So it's not only focused on the capital. You take Gujarat, it's focused on Amdabad, a few or one or two cities. But in Tamil Nadu it's everywhere. Chennai, Tirupur, Coimbatore, Salem, Sevagasi, Vellore. And because of that, again as Mr. Andrew White said, the caste groups are spatially spread out. So because of that all caste groups were able to grow. And this was also enabled by the infrastructure that was created by the Dravidian movement as well as by access on education provided to all. And also if you look with growth composition of the entrepreneurs, I would say one in two Dalit entrepreneurs live in Tamil Nadu and about majority of the OBC entrepreneurs, not SMEs, from SMEs to big corporate offices, they are based in Tamil Nadu. In fact, if you look at the list of India's top 100 richest people, you would see the list is probably 98%, 98% two upper caste or three upper caste. But there will be few names, three or four names and those who represent the OBCs and those names will be from Tamil Nadu. And even if you look at, so you may argue that per capita growth in Gujarat and Maharashtra site higher than Tamil Nadu. So the counter argument for it is, there you find 10 or 15 really big corporate houses and most of the income is concentrated in their hands and because of that, you see the per capita income is very high, the average income aside, but not the median income. So if you compare Guinea index, I've been looking for the Guinea index for states in India, which is something I do not get, but I'm very sure Tamil Nadu would have a very low Guinea index and Gujarat and Maharashtra have a very high Guinea index. So Christophe Jeffrola in his book, Caste Politics says that caste in India is like tightly knit cylinders and each cylinders are floating inside a bubble. So even if the country is growing, it's only that one cylinder is going to get all the growth and other cylinders are completely isolated. So Tamil Nadu, I would say Tamil Nadu is the only place where all these cylinders are intertwined. So there's another rhetoric that's put forward by people who hate Dravidianism. They say, no, no, no, the reason for growth of Tamil Nadu is not DMK or ADMK, it is Kamarajat. But what people forget is Kamarajat was in 5 to 7 years and the reason why Kamarajat came and became Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, who was the first OBC to be Chief Minister of any Indian state was because of the Dravidian movement. Because the Dravidian movement and DMK were becoming really powerful, Congress wanted someone from OBC community and none other than Nadar was made as a Chief Minister. And again, when Congress was in power, most of the agenda was set by both Dravidan Kalakam as well as the DMK. They paid a major role in agenda setting. For example, if you remember, the first Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu wanted to bring education based on what you call on their family occupation, which is again Kulakalvi in Tamil. So again, it was promoting casteism. It was again only because of the protest by DMK that was kind of annulled. So there was, there's been great role played by the movement even before India gained independence. If you look, the movement is 50 to 60 years old before they came to power. So you can also ask my question. So if you say such DMK was responsible, ADMK was responsible for growth of Tamil Nadu, why the same did not happen in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, where you have a same movement, even the movement was stronger. Plus, they also had India's first Delhi Chief Minister. So even the famous research Amit Ahuja in his recent book talks about, though there is more mobilisation in UPBR than Tamil Nadu, economic growth did not happen or changes in education fulfilment or fundamental social economic growth did not happen. So there are primarily three reasons for it. So the first reason is they were not able to manage a common consensus like Professor Vijay Bhaskar was explaining. So the horizontal consolidation was not very easy. Each of them have their own caste pride and their own aspirations. And also within the caste, in the sense, even if you say, let's say, one year of jealous, the founders and founders are jealous of the caste above them. So those kind of frictions. So in Tamil Nadu, because of Justice Party, DK and DMK and also Periyar, because of their efforts for the last 50, 60 years, they were able to mobilize people all together against one common group of people that's Brahmins. So this created the social cohesion. And second thing is the most important, that is administrative reforms, which was done both by the movement, Justice Party and DK as well as by the DMK. So this reforms in the bureaucracy increased the capacity of the state to execute and deliver to the demands of the regular people, private sector, as well as the businesses. And the first and the most important thing which DMK did when they came to power was to remove rural positions based on hereditary and caste. And again, the elitization of bureaucracy. So for example, I also run this thing called Dravida Professional Forum, which was founded by the Honorable Minister for Finance P.T.A. Palliwell-Thyagarajan. So we had the senior ex-bureaucrat, Mr. Narayan, who was in charge for setting up midday meals in India. He came and spoke to us. And he was saying that one of his junior officers, who had actually implemented midday meals along with him, was hired by World Bank. And it was a fire assignment. They want to do the same thing, improve the capacity like in Tamil Nadu, in West Bengal and states like Odisha in the 90s. And he tried hard for five years and failed. And Narayan says, the reason was ethos. The officials were not in sync with the demand of the population. So in Tamil Nadu, what they did was they were able to link the bureaucracy with social justice through reservation and also via de-elitization. So by which what I mean is people from all walks of life were brought into bureaucracy. If you will now look at chief engineers of Tamil Nadu of every department, they represent every caste in the state. Or if you go to the northern state, most of the officials you would see from very few elite caste. So because of that, they had empathy. So because of the empathy, they were able to understand the needs of people belonging to their caste. And because of this people are also easily able to walk to a Thalu office or block office or basically even to collector's office and demand their rights. And another most important thing was the organization structure. So when DMK had an organization from district secretaries, who was equivalent to a collector and then village panjaited. So because of these, these people kind of worked in parallel to the bureaucracy. So sometimes they work in, they work to fulfill the aspiration of their constituents. So there's also this study by Mr. Wain, I think he made a study around India. And he also spoke to people and he was very curious why they had to create institutes like IITs and IMs. IITs and IMs for a country like India, which probably takes about 0.5 or 0.1% of students. Why should they spend so much money? Because those money could have been spent on primary education. And then he says in his study that because all the decision makers belong to the top most community, the Brahmin community, they were not able to understand the aspirations of the broader segment of Indians as a whole. And that's the only reason why instead of spending on primary education, huge amount of money was setting up of these institutions. And also there's another interesting book by Mr. Vivek Shri was on delivering public services in Tamil Nadu where he travels across India and says that Tamil Nadu and Kerala are two unique states when it comes to delivery of public services. And he says the same reason of how the empathy among the officials is the reason. The third point would be the role of justice party. So Justice created his manifesto in 1927. And so the first and other things they did in the manifesto was to ban schools that did not accept students from lower caste, remove revoke permits for bus licenses for buses that refused to take people belonging to inferior caste. And then also for the first time in India, they had the industrial policy. So no state had industrial policy unless until justice party came and introduced the same. So what industrialization did was it helped in rapid urbanization. So what rapid urbanization did was move people to urban areas. So village is the place where all the caste hierarchies are really hard or really strong. So because people kind of move to urban areas that also helped in the direction of caste hierarchies. So even now if you look both DMK and ADMK have throughout time worked to fulfill the policy party manifesto. Look, DMK played a major role in promoting MSMEs. We are starting SIPCOT, SIPCO and also ADMK under MGR expanded the medium he started by the justice party. So then another misnomer I wanted to talk about is freebies. So I think the term doesn't exist. So there have been a lot of criticism saying both DMK and ADMK are squandering the public money by giving freebies. I think it's not a freebie, it's not a term. So recently a leader announced 4000 rupees to each person who needs it. And again there were articles written which said all these are freebies. But these are not freebies. These are given to people in need. These are given to people who make less than $5 a day or $4 a day or $3 a day. So it's basically simple economics. You put money in hands of people who don't have it. The economy goes. The economy will definitely grow. And also they said no, no, no, trickle down economy will work. So they should focus only on the industries. In a stratified society like India, trickle down economy will definitely not work unless you can unify and make them unitary. In fact, even in a comparatively unitary society, that is the US, trickle down economics has not worked from 1980s until now. Inequality has grown really big. So again, another criticism which was made, even now it is being made is giving free color TVs, which was seen as blatant corruption. But research paper published by Oxford University Press clearly says that giving color TV along with access to cable TV empowered women the most. They compared the study with, compared Tamil Nadu city in Brazil as well as Kenya. They say when women started watching TVs more they were able to get the aspiration of women in the cities. They refused being beaten up by the husbands more. They kind of also wanted to put women children in school. So enrollment women's children increased drastically. So going to the future of the movement, I would say future of the movement will now depend on how DMK performs because DMK means only party and how to be managing resources. And there are also other constraints which we did not have earlier, which we did not have earlier, such as we have a really strong BJP government. And they want to create one state, one language and one culture and every day we see new policies that's coming and that's kind of fitting fatalism. So as Vijay Bhaskam mentioned, GSTs have completely stopped states autonomy to tax goods. And again, we are dependent on the central government for money. So if the relationships are not good, the money is not going to come. Already state finances are really bad shape. I think it's 5.7 lakhs crores plus about another 3.3 lakhs with about 9 lakh crores are dead, which is I would say about 100 billion euros. So that's the another problem. Plus, we have interference in education such as NEET. So for example, the reason why Tamil Nadu has one of the best healthcare system is because we didn't have a controlled exam. It was through a simple 12th exam and also 12th board was easier. So it was equal for everyone. So because of that and also there was reservation across cast lines and also reservation for students studying in government schools and students from rural area. Because of this, we had doctors from every region and this enabled spatial distribution of doctors. In fact, even Norway is struggling to find doctors in the remote regions of Norway. So in Tamil Nadu that wasn't a problem because of the C entrance exams are definitely beneficial to the elites. And in poor country like India are definitely going to pay with the rich. So then we don't have, poor are going to be marginalized. So poor means lower caste. So which means, which means there's not going to be spatial distribution of doctors. In fact, I studied in Sianspo. So the elite French school where most of the French students who want to be presidents, they go and study. So even Sianspo last year canceled the entrance exam saying it only promotes elites to join. So only elites get into the public service. So if it's the same for a country which is so low in any index and has a very high per capita GDP. So for India, then entrance exams are definitely discriminatory. So now we don't have the relaxation even with the national education policy. There's a lot of interference in education. Another thing that's going to hinder our policies is increase in growth via private sector companies. So now growth is proper, we have private sector companies. So we can't provide affirmative action. And so there's again some caste might be left out. And another example of touching government institutions or universities in Tamil Nadu is the central government wanted to take Anna University and make it into an institute of eminence. So these things are definitely going to make things very difficult for DMK and also to take the movement very forward. So other things that the movement can work is to make it more inclusive for women. If you hear Mr. Varnier speak, he spoke about how there are very less women within the DMK. So that could be one aspect and second aspect is also youth. If you look at number of MLAs with less than age of 45 minimum. So these are the two things which a party should focus on and also to cater to the aspirations of these categories. So I would like to conclude by saying whatever India tries to do, it can achieve growth only by trying to make every community grow. That's to by providing equitable growth. So the only way or only way possible for all of India to grow is the TN model. So whatever the structural reforms we make until we make sure that money is not concentrated on the hands of the few, we will not be able to grow. So with this, I would like to end. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for your overview of, you know, Yeah, okay. Yeah, I mean, we've had, we've, you know, you've given this, this big long kind of picture as to where the DMK proposes to move. Obviously there are areas where mobilization would get possibly stronger in the coming years, given the way the political dialogue is moving to attract the youth in climate justice, ecological justice and those kind of newer areas of intervention. And also you talked about how women's participation can be increased through new technologies, possibly access to technologies. So it's really, you know, you're bringing back the whole point of increase access and expand areas of access, and therefore engage with a more inclusive dialogue. You also obviously shown this, you know, the long term, very unique Tamil Nadu's position of building this kind of caste solidarity, that is not just about individual casts, but to question constantly the elitism within the caste movement and how the lower caste groups have, have mobilized along those lines. I think that's that's another area that can then strengthen some, some new environmental movements or new areas of the economy. And with that I want to highlight a particular question that has been raised by Professor Barbara Harris White from Oxford University, where she talks about waste economy, and how modernity means waste and waste is the fastest growing economic sector, though you wouldn't know because there are no data, as she says, but waste is regarded as a tech engineering sector with HGs, NGOs added to the sambhar but it's a caste problem. The upper caste who act as those entitled to throw waste. It is a huge sector still dominated by SCs and STs, and local tax evasion staffs municipalities of the finance needed to deal with waste so you have rampant privatization and contractualization in which the conditions of work and the incomes of those who deal with waste has nose dived dramatically in recent times. So the informal economy is now essential to Tamil Nadu's urban and increasingly rural cleanliness. So if Tamil Nadu's politics still stands for social justice, why don't you lead India and clean up waste. I think it also ties up with organizing decent work conditions, recycling issues, as well as the youth politics that we were talking about, and new areas in which this can be tied with entrepreneurship technology, as well as growth in some form. So that's that's one point that probably ties up with your manifesto of where DMK could move. And there's also some other points that I think the whole issue of education we've already discussed what what NEP is trying to do and what difficulties therefore NEP can pose for the DMK. I think the other questions we've more or less touched, I can't see anything else at the moment in the question panel. So if there's Dharan Dharan you have to leave perhaps the question is quite general. And I think anybody who in the panel, Professor Vijay Bhaskar if you want to say anything on waste economy, or Andrew if you want to say anything. Prabhu if you have any points to add to already what Dharan Dharan has said, then we can just wrap up the session from there on. Anyone from the panel? I don't have anything to say except I'm in agreement with Dharan Dharan saying that waste economics are definitely tied to past segmentation of the labour market and with this by large extent of investment. But my only thing is it has always been the case. It would be difficult for me to make the case that these things have got worse than now. That may not be quite except the fact that the intensity of the amount of waste generation, the amount of labour that is kind of involved in cleaning up this has probably increased. But apart from the fact that has been a contractualization happening of workers within sanitation departments of rural bodies, even when they were there, there was a large amount of informal waste because operating simultaneously. Do we see any shift in Dalit enterprise around waste economy? Yeah, you do find Dalit enterprises emerging, especially in smaller towns in waste disposal, especially mechanized waste disposal, human waste particularly have seen that happen and other things happen as well. But they're all small scale. The thing about capital, it is driven by caste. We know access to capital has been suffused with caste all along. So what is kind of visible is this more immediate kind of relationship between caste and capital at the local level, at the retail level, not just about Dalit human and backward caste and the kind of alliance between political elites and etc and so on. But what is interesting is seldom do these businesses become big. Very rarely, except for this very small phase in the post-1990s where you had a business group like GMR, GBK and IVRCL from Andhra Pradesh, moving from the domain of provincial accumulation to relatively pan-Indian kind of accumulation. You don't find any businesses actually kind of competing with this established big business groups. And established big business groups are all, again, relatively, not relatively, they're all upper caste or in traditional North Indian communities. So this thing, this capitalist, it's not just labor, but capital is also, you know, simply conditioned by caste and extent to which people from lower caste, capital from lower caste can actually become bigger pan-Indians seems to be very, very difficult and much more so in the current phase. Sure. Yeah, I think overall we have, you know, we've kind of raised this whole point of, you know, why BJP is also still not quite performing in the well in the states, what are its own obstacles. And we can see that, you know, the DMK has capitalized on some points, its manifesto obviously tries to, you know, rope in as many differences as possible, but also create that kind of an inclusive agenda within its very progressive manifesto to tide over all these various divisions. But on the other hand, the central government is also trying to through its say new education policy or to remove affirmative actions or through its own measures. There is this drive, there's a social narrative that, you know, less of state intervention in determining property relations in cutting back on dictating social norms, etc. But there is that thing that, you know, the state is unable to control these things. So that kind of will always remain the challenge and that will always remain the struggle for states, I feel. And apart from that, BJP has its own kind of top level poor state performance because of its own limitations of local leadership, or its poor performance of the economy and particularly in the pandemic context, you know, the difference between state management and the central management of the disputes around who manages the vaccine, the vaccine nationalism itself is showing these kind of fractures and divisions quite clearly now. And within, within all this, you know, how would we situate any overarching debate that is now nationally, many people are talking about, is this a failed state say the center is a failed state how would the states then respond to anything. This is a failed state but some people are sort of saying, could be this potential failed state. So this image does it actually help or does it actually fuel the state center relations in a different direction, you know, given the kind of larger structure, and particularly with Tamil Nadu where the emphasis is on Dravidian ideology in this whole grassroots movement that it's that that is quite strong there, and it tries to, you know, build on that and move forward. So, on the one hand there is a strong grassroots movement on the other hand there is that kind of top down measures that are constantly coming and I think that's where the challenge would be for DMK to tide over so if there are any final comments from the panel. These are my thoughts that I've seen from the discussion. Yeah, I would bring two things together so I kind of really interested in the state cabinet and what strikes me is really interesting is that I'm not sure that MK Stalin stands above the cabinet in quite the way that his father did. And I don't think that's necessarily problematic and I just mentioned something that MSS Panyan wrote about six years ago when she talked about Miranda Modi and the politics of decisionism that a lot of people superficially very attracted to Modi's business and I think what we know six years on is, you can be decisive and frankly talk complete nonsense, and it's not helpful and you, you have to evolve a kind of plural style of politics, in which, you know, you devolve delegate other, you know, cabinet colleagues to your very, very able civil servants and so on and this is the problem with the center is that Modi just doesn't trust people around him and expertise and so on and I think that's part of the problem, you know, where we're at it's not. It's as true of the economy as it is of the response to COVID so plural politics it doesn't look very attractive and people can mock it is kind of policy drift and all the rest of it but but actually, I think India in many ways is a very mature state and then politically very mature and sadly in the last six years have rolled back from that I think and I think Tom that is interesting because still there's a sense in which this kind of pluralism is there so it's not perfect by any means but it is, you know, it's, it's how politics works, you know it's complicated and it's messy. Yeah, we have one or one or two minutes left for anyone or two statements from all of you. No, I mean, it is excessive to, you know, speak your language or fail state I mean it was state failure. Certainly, I mean having lived through it, you know, I can attest to it. But, you know, you can't really say that the public health system collapse because it was not equipped to deal with the situation, you know, in the first place where it was not allowed to, you know, equip itself to deal with you with the situation. As far as the center state tradition is concerned. I think the attempt of the BJP is to, you know, deal with each and every state individually and try to avoid the formation of an opposition from that would necessarily come from regional formations. And what we've seen over the past few months it's more and more, you know, regional parties or regionalist parties talking to one another and expressing themselves in concert and basically planting the seed of a future opposition front. And so the more the BJP, the government pushes, you know, on the button of, you know, centralism and unionized real decisions and and championing on, you know, stays prerogative and so forth, the more it's going to push all those party leaders together. And the fact that you don't have immensely towering figures, you know, is actually conducive to building, you know, coalition that I would hope to at least be a little bit functioning was been seen in the past. And so, so the next few months are going to be really interesting. Everything is going to focus is going to turn on UP. So everything is going to be, you know, about that, but I would really urge everyone to keep looking at what's happening in the state that just went to the pool. Yeah, yeah, I think I think I want to tell the audience that, you know, we're going to keep this kind of conversation rolling, bring more comparative examples and, you know, look at more specific questions of leadership. The last question is obviously quite big and broad and so diverse and the interesting thing from this panel is that, you know, there isn't, there isn't that that understanding which is quite holistic about cast but also how it connects specifically to electoral performances, leadership questions, ability to create consensus around certain groups within the cast, and also the practice of elitism and questioning elitism from within. So a lot of these issues came up very well. So if you have another line to add and then we wrap up with Vijay Bhaskar and then finish this. I just wanted to say I think like there has been two themes like which I feel kind of been repeated and like that was in my mind was like one is health and education inequalities and other support inclusion. And like so far obviously like it has been like only five weeks like since the new government has come into place and there was a lot of expectations. And I'm hoping like once the COVID situation is like better I'm like looking forward to see more of like the clarification of their stand and this being justified. Thank you. Vijay Bhaskar there is a point about anti intellectualism. You know whether that is that that is going to be the trend or you feel you don't want to answer that and leave it for another time. Yes. I think the point is about prevailing and growing anti intellectualism in both Dravidian and central parties. There isn't a fine distinction here but I think anti intellectualism is is a trend in in other parts of this world it's a kind of a global question perhaps as well. I don't know I was thinking that recently especially if you look at the looks of elections I think there are write-ups in the newspapers that work out a series of victory. So I don't know. Another thing I mean definitely lessons into the case I don't think that's good. But having said that yeah I mean as I mean as states always have they always been looked at the political support I don't know. So the point about the center state relation right now is is to kind of keep watching and looking at more comparative prospects here. And of course the pandemic and the response is going to shape quite a lot as to how we look at reconstruction, as well as leadership questions, and we look forward to more sessions like this. On that note, I want to thank Professor Villa busker for being with us, Andrew about to stay this long, and also Dr very near to be with us for agenda and as well. Thank you also for your participation and being here. I think our other speakers have now left, and I want to wrap this up, and a very good evening to all of you. Thank you again. Bye. Excellent. Thank you so much.