E P Unny travels through the poll-bound southern states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and the union territory of Puducherry to find interchanged campaign styles and voter attitudes, but not one confident player.
These neighbouring states have been voting out their rulers. Kerala, ever since 1980, and Tamil Nadu, after the days of M G Ramachandran. MGR, the film legend, reigned through three successive chief ministerial terms for 10 years till his death in 1987. Incidentally, he was a migrant from Kerala. There has been no such big-ticket crossover since, but this time there is a virtual barter of campaign styles and voter attitudes across the linguistic border. The Kerala campaign looks a bit Tamil-like, more demonstrative than ever before, while Tamil voters seem to be sizing up their tired iconic leaders with the measured air of the Malayali.
With the colour shift has come content change. Coast to coast through seven days and 1,740 km, you hear a steady buzz of trends being bucked. Does that mean incumbent chief ministers Jayalalithaa and Oommen Chandy will stay on? Against considerable odds — Amma ran a whole term with little access to her party and public while Chandy’s office gave free access to just about any trespasser. Supporters say the Dravidian supremo will continue on the sheer strength of freebies and the coalition head (the Congress heads the United Democratic Front (UDF) in Kerala) on his developmental promise. Analysts add that both are subject to an emerging third factor.
Multi-cornered upsets are nothing new in either state but never before has a state-wide third way stared you in the face. The Vijayakanth front in Tamil Nadu and the BJP-led alliance in Kerala could garner enough votes to spoil and arguably enough seats to be kingmakers. Does it mean it is curtains for the boring bipolar battles – between two Dravidian parties and two Kerala coalitions? Is politics in these parts turning triangular or just more angular? The devil could well be in the detail, particularly in the small surprises closer to the ground.
To begin with, the most rousing campaign is no longer run by Amma or Kalaignar but by the unlikely Achuthanandan. Known by his initials VS, the Marxist veteran speaks as plainly as he dresses. At 92, he needs help to negotiate the makeshift stairway to the podium. The mid-noon crowd at sweltering Kanjirappally, in Kottayam district, laps up his trademark singsong flourishes, done to death by Malayali mimics. Elsewhere, his occasional memory lapse — mixing up Narendra Modi with Narasimha Rao — is nitpicked by the media but the audience doesn’t care.
Why then is a star campaigner being projected this half-heartedly? Ask a CPM man and he looks the other way. The party just ushered in the clean shaven VS most volubly as Fidel Castro, perhaps not so much for vintage revolutionary zeal but hoping he would do his poll-time deed and make way for Raul Castro (read Pinarayi Vijayan, the unnamed CM-in-waiting who shaped the state CPM unit as secretary for a good 17 years).
In a five-minute cameo, VS creates a stir missing in Tamil poll rallies that last longer than feature films. Back in the 1980s, voters in Tamil Nadu would wait for hours for Kalaignar through warm-up sessions by voice artists – minor celebs in their own right with sensational appellations like ‘Pal kural mannan Rocket Vincent’ (Vincent, the king of many voices who goes like a rocket). Then Karunanidhi’s voice competed with MGR’s face. The voice is now straining to be heard above the familial din and the face that succeeded MGR nearly three decades ago remains the only one in the faceless party.
There is little sign of the voice or the face through miles and miles across the politically vibrant Tamil towns of Coimbatore, Trichy, Thiruvarur, Theni, Chidambaram, Dindigul,… You know an election is on because your vehicle is stopped periodically by police and extra-polite poll officials. The Election Commission has put up catchy billboards where a silhouetted Gandhiji and an animated Abdul Kalam take turns to urge you to step out on May 16 and vote ethically. Cops are seizing cold cash from all over and the day’s catch is enough to fill several ATMs.
Fine to promote a good cause but why monopolise public display in the bargain. Is it even legal to deny parties their right to showcase candidates, symbols and slogans? A poll official explains: “We all have to enforce the model code of conduct. Each regime finds the best way to do it. Here in Puducherry, there is a law against disfigurement of public places that includes private spaces in public view. So zero tolerance for visual publicity here. In Tamil Nadu, some spectacle is allowed around rallies and meetings.”
Parties and voters have their own ways of coping with denial. A low-key campaign suits the lonely BJP. It plays a listless poll song set significantly to an old MGR film tune, indicating an unburnt bridge with Amma — all the way to the Rajya Sabha. As for poll-speak, only public expression is restricted, not private texting, far more lethal. When a DMK rally blocks traffic near the Trichy railway station, road users stranded under a partly done flyover pull out cellphones to vent their spleen: on not just the leaders who ruined their evening but whoever failed to complete the flyover that would have cleared up the clutter. Back home when tempers cool through the night that refuses to, they would resume WhatsApp poll chats.
Back to the physical space, you are reconciled to the campaign blackout when out of the blue appears the godsend graffiti on a suburban wall at Seelayampatti in Theni district — the rising sun and the twin leaves done in the retro stencil style. Facing the symbols of the Dravidian majors, across the road sits Muthayya, a wayside tailor working out of a push cart. Retired from a nearby tea estate, the 70-plus elder took up this second livelihood because he must work to live. No old age pension; no medicare; no freebies. The welfare race has sped past this workman. “I saved up and bought the push cart but the sewing machine is on rent. They give mixies and grinders; no working tool.” Will you vote? “Surely,” he says with a broad smile, lips sealed on the choice. A perfect foil to the livid anti-government outburst by a lottery ticket vendor in Kerala.
All of Kerala isn’t that candid. But it is surely being wooed more candidly than ever before – more ceremonially, more graphically, more anxiously. Posters, banners, cut-outs, bill boards in harmless cloth and toxic plastic. Larger-than-life images screaming out of street corners offset by vertical arrays of faces eerily shrunk into the meagre width of utility poles. A free mix of forms, fonts and formats.
For the likes of CPI’s Bijimol, sitting MLA at Peerumedu in Idukki district, a new favourite is the group photo – the candidate in the company of farmers, plantation workers, college kids and women. Often in distinct homogenous groups rather than in a mixed crowd, quite in keeping with the block-vote hunting that is in vogue. More vitally, in such group pictures, the candidate doesn’t make that crucial eye contact with the onlooker. Again, visuals are so souped up on Photoshop that they could clash with the staid mug shot on the voting machine. The poor voter might lose all sense of facial recognition. Photoshop could be a spoiler.
In this overzealous splurge of new-found image-making, a new gestural vocabulary is emerging. Two young faces from the Rahul brigade, V T Balram and Shafi Parambil, are seen in poster after worrisome poster with the right hand pressed against the chest. The radiant faces betray no sign of cardiac distress. It turns out to be a new hearty hand salute that is gaining state-wide currency.
Even as these Congressmen are acting coy with their hand symbol, their Marxist opponents, Subaida Ishaq and N N Krishnadas, are freely waving their hands. So does their leader V S and look who is waving back — A K Antony. He is asking for a BJP-mukt Kerala. The visiting Sitaram Yechury is nodding along.
Amidst such flux and much nuance, there is however one blunt instrument almost every southern leader swears by — prohibition. In Kerala, the country’s hardest drinking state, Congressmen and comrades are brawling to look uber Gandhian. In neighbouring TN, Dravidian parties are threatening self-immolation on the matter as is their wont. This could indeed happen if the freebie state goes dry and soon enough broke. Both states would have to settle for pilgrim tourism unless abstinence stays on paper like socialism does so well, enshrined as it is in the Constitution’s preamble.
Travellers will head for the welcoming Puducherry. The only party threatening to drip dry this once French heritage destination is the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK). Led by Dr S Ramadoss and son Dr Anbumani Ramadoss, PMK’s turf for the moment is confined to northern Tamil Nadu, where it works out of a sprawling farm house in Thailapuram. The good doctors can teach the BJP a thing or two on appropriation. Busts of Periyar, Ambedkar and Marx stand guard over the party’s militant caste base. Windswept festoons and dried up garlands give away a recent enough celebration of the threesome.
Heaps of fresh flowers and garlands also greet you at seven in the morning, when you enter the first floor of the Puducherry CM’s home. You see three men at work decking up a wall full of deities and saints. There were intimations of divinity even as you stepped into the house. In the front room absolutely bare, sat stone still and eyes shut a clean shaven version of Baba Ramdev.
The prime devotee N Rangasamy himself is nowhere to be seen. He has been playing hide and seek since the previous evening and not tennis as his aides claimed. This Kamaraj loyalist lives true to form in a clumsy house on one of the most congested streets of the town, in his chief ministerial watch for 12 years in two stretches. A champion survivor in a dicey polity, NR needs divine intervention. Who doesn’t?
Some election! Coast to coast, not one confident player.
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