If subnational political regimes can shape development trajectories, the constituents of such a regime, and the factors enabling this, require explanation. Towards this, in this chapter, we develop a framework to understand the factors and processes contributing to the state's developmental achievements. We emphasise the primary role played by Dravidian mobilisation against upper-caste hegemony and its vision of social justice in shaping this regime (Pandian 2007; Rajadurai and Geetha 2009; Krishnan and Sriramachandran 2018a and 2018b). We highlight the political labour involved in the formation of a historic bloc or a ‘people’ comprising of a range of subaltern groups under a transitive ‘Dravidian’–‘Tamil’–‘non-Brahmin’ identity against this hegemony. We argue that this mobilisation articulated a demand for ‘self-respect’ and ‘social justice’ which has shaped the development trajectory of the state as political regimes sought to respond to this demand. Social justice was to be secured through a process of inclusive modernisation that will undermine the caste-based division of labour. The mobilisation thus demanded, and sought to ensure, equality of opportunity in the expanding modern domain. We draw upon Laclau's (2005) interpretation of populist mobilisation to understand how such demands coalesced to become a ‘Dravidian common-sense’ (Forgacs 2000) in the state, and shaped its subsequent development.

Following Pandian (1994, 2007), Rajadurai and Geetha (1996) and Geetha and Rajadurai (2008), we show how leaders of the Justice party, the political precursor to the Dravidian movement, and subsequently Periyar, founder of the Dravidian movement and the Self-Respect Movement (SRM) distinguished the ‘productive’ ‘non-Brahmin’ castes from those who survived off rentierism and/or through labour that did not contribute to the well-being of the region. Their mobilisation made visible the contours of caste-based social injustice, constituting in turn what we refer to as ‘Dravidian common-sense’ that comprised of securing justice through caste-based reservation, faith in a productivist ethos, need for greater state autonomy and forging an inclusive modernity. Importantly, as Pandian and more recently Sriramachandran (2018) point out, mobilisation was not founded on essentialised identities, but through forging of Dravidian ‘people’ based on an aggregation of disparate subaltern ‘social’ demands. We propose that the Dravidian movement approximates to what Mouffe (2018) calls left populism that effectively created a chain of equivalence between caste oppression and Dravidian-Tamil identity.