India’s second largest cooperative dairy brand Nandini has emerged as the latest political weapon for the South’s regional parties JDS and DMK to beat the ruling BJP after a missive from a central organisation is seen as an attempt to impose Hindi on the south.

Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin was the first to protest on Wednesday, and the same has now been lapped up by former CM HD Kumaraswamy whose party JDS has a formidable presence in the dairy belt of Old Mysuru region. Nandini was the pride of Kannadigas, and not subservient to Gujarat’s Amul, he said, in a series of tweets.

Both the Congress and JDS have been trying to turn the milk brand into a political issue, seeking to show the BJP as a “Hindi-first” party in the run up to the May 10 assembly polls in Karnataka.

A direction from the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (Fssai) asking the Karnataka Cooperative Milk Federation (KMF), which owns Nandini, to use the word ‘Dahi’ on its curd packets has not gone down well with the political parties of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Kumaraswamy accused the Centre of using the FSSAI to impose Hindi on the popular KMF brand. The government had done this knowing fully well that Kannadigas were opposed to the imposition of Hindi. This was the beginning of a conspiracy to merge Nandini with the Amul in Gujarat, he said, alleging home and cooperation minister Amit Shah behind it.

He also blamed the KMF for printing Dahi going against the sentiments of Kannadigas, and accused the State’s ruling BJP regime of being aware of it. He alleged it was a backroom attempt to weaken the brand Nandini and merge it with Amul on Wednesday tweeted that the “unabashed insistences of #HindiImposition have come to the extent of directing us to label even a curd packet in Hindi, relegating Tamil & Kannada in our own states…Such brazen disregard to our mother tongues will make sure those responsible are banished from South forever.”

BJP Tamil Nadu unit chief K Annamalai urged the FSSAI to withdraw the order, saying it was not in sync with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts to promote regional languages. He wanted the organisation to allow state cooperatives to use their respective regional languages.The dairy brand became a political weapon for the JDS and Congress to target the BJP ever since Amit Shah visited Mandya in December to open a dairy unit and commented about Amul and Nandini working together. Shah had said: “Amul and Nandini will work together towards establishing primary dairies in every village of Karnataka and in the next three years, there will not be a single village in Karnataka where a primary dairy has not been established.”