‘Yes, but not in the South’

South India (Andhra, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu) has behaved differently in general elections for more than half a century. National parties have consistently won a smaller proportion of the seats here while regional parties have correspondingly performed better. The trend was exaggerated by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national triumph in 2014 when it won barely a sixth of the seats from the south. This chapter examines the historical antecedents and the wider political significance of this divergence.