Bertrand Russell

The next prime minister of India is not the lame duck Manmohan Singh, not the lacklustre L K Advani, not the acerbic woman from Uttar Pradesh gloating Dalit pride, but the unfathomable Amma from Tamil Nadu. The decision is of Amma’s chosen man Vaiko, whom her government had jailed in July 2002 for more than 18 months under POTA. His casus belli then, namely Tamil Eelam, is Amma’s cause celebre now.

On April 19, Vaiko, the MDMK secretary, proposed AIADMK general secretary J Jayalalithaa’s name for the post of prime minister, with an encomium that she is ‘the fittest candidate’, and an encore that ‘I shall canvass support for this dynamic leader with versatile capabilities for the post of prime minister, unmindful of the absence of her aspirations’.

Whether Jayalalithaa has prime ministerial aspirations or not, and whether Vaiko is capable of fulfilling them, as the prima donna of the Theatre of the Absurd, Jayalalithaa’s stake in the 15th Lok Sabha elections is very high. The reason is not her ‘Draupadi vow’ as a ‘woman wronged’ by the DMK. Dispatching the DMK president, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, to jail on June 30, 2001 in a post-midnight act settled this squarely. The reason is that it is only with the DMK’s defeat that the dramatis personae of the AIADMK alliance can get the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections advanced without waiting till 2011.

While the concern about the election victory is thus well-founded, the exuberance which the AIADMK alliance is exuding now as though its victory is a fait accompli is also well-founded, for at least nine reasons.

One, if a leader is a dealer in hope, an adage attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, DMK has none. Its star campaigner is too old and ailing, unable to sit, unable to stand, unable to lie (in the sense of resting in a horizontal position), and worst still, unable to speak coherently. In contrast, Jayalalithaa, the star campaigner of the AIADMK alliance, with her eloquent and evocative oratory continues to be the number one crowd puller.

Two, if the winning factor in Lok Sabha elections is the ability to sew up and retain alliances, Jayalalithaa has got her alliance arithmetic well. She has with her the MDMK, PMK, CPI and CPI(M). If Jayalalithaa did not make it to the 14th Lok Sabha it was not for want of vote share. The vote share percentage of the AIADMK was 29.77 while that of the DMK and the INC was 24.60 and 14.40. The MDMK, PMK, CPI and the CPI(M) that were with the DMK are now with the AIADMK. Their vote share is likely to improve this time because of the alliance arithmetic.

Three, the anti-incumbency factor. Chief minister Karunanidhi’s working from a hospital or a wife’s house, and inability to move about freely without the crutch of a Maran has been showing the administration in poor light. That apart, when the state has its own hospitals his treatment in a private hospital amounts to patronising it much to the neglect and against the well-being of state institutions.

Four, the freebies frenzy, promising gifts to voters if voted to power in the May 8, 2006 Assembly elections, mired state politics and social welfare initiatives in wasteful, cheap competitive populism at the expense of tax payers. The promises with a gender spin (free television set to every family for ‘women’s recreation and general knowledge’; ‘quality rice’ at one rupee a kilo to ‘make women feel happy at heart’; free gas stoves; two acres of land to the landless, and so on) were halting, and even disgusting to many eligible aspirants because of corruption and malpractices.

Five, appeasing socio-religious communities such as Arunthathiyar, Christians and Muslims, with reservation was easy as all that it involved was mere paper notification (without follow-up action); and as grandmas would have it, paper is patient.

Promising freebies was also easy as promises are seldom kept up. But taking the state on to the path of growth and implementing employment generating schemes are difficult as they entail political will and earnestness in purpose. The victims of the resultant failure are the youth, with over 52 lakh of them registered with the employment exchanges in the state.

Six, the farmers’ problems relating to fertiliser shortage, frequent power cuts, and so on; and the continuing discontent of the Dalits because of ill-treatment by caste-Hindus and government’s failure to provide basic amenities, has made many Dalit villages to boycott the elections.

Seven, in an Aristotelian sense three qualifications are requisite in the holders of the supreme offices of the state: loyalty to the polity; capacity for their offices; and virtue and justice in the sense appropriate to the polity. All these are dismally lacking in the DMK rule. How Karunanidhi inducted his kith and kin into the DMK is a telltale of democracy degenerating into family rule. The issue raised by Jayalalithaa that how, Karunanidhi, who started his life’s journey, as a ticketless traveller managed to amass wealth is pertinent. So also the 20 per cent stake of Karunanidhi’s wife, Dayalu Ammal, in the Rs 600-crore Sun Network and its Tamil publications, which she withdrew in November 2007; and the financial source for starting the Kalaignar TV in September 2007.

Eight, the allegations raised by Jayalalithaa of Dayanidhi Maran misusing his ministerial position, with even a high-tech telephone exchange installed at his residence; and of his successor Raja in the Spectrum Scam involving about one lakh crore rupees, though known for some time have not been investigated by the Centre.

Nine, though the Lankan Tamil problem has been decades old, the manner in which Karunanidhi went about it since August 2008, starting with collecting resignation letters from the Central ministers from Tamil Nadu and his recent inane mouthing such as Prabhakaran is his good friend as though said in a delirium, smacked of crass opportunism. From Karunanidhi’s farcical acts and tactical blunders Jayalalithaa made a marvellous masterstroke, assuring a Tamil Eelam if her alliance won the elections.

While making her alliance partners jubilant, her assurance, a bolt from the blue to Karunanidhi, made him forlorn, after which instead of rushing him to a hospital he was rushed to the Anna Samadhi for his make-believe fast on April 27.

As for Jayalalithaa’s assurance of Eelam, Niccolo Machiavelli’s dictum: ‘The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present’, comes to mind.

P Radhakrishnan First Published : 12 May 2009 01:25:00 AM IST Last Updated : 12 May 2009 01:55:50 AM IST