Tags:
Journalism of Courage
It8217;s 10:15 a.m. on Day 6 of the praja ankita yatra. Andhra Pradesh8217;s 8216;Megastar8217;-turned-politician stands atop a squat platform mounted on the roof of a specially designed campaign vehicle. As the convoy begins its slow trundle through the coconut palm fringed suburb of Tagarapuvalasa on the edge of Visakhapatnam, to the explosion of crackers and the throb of music composed in his praise, Chiranjeevi waves and smiles. It is not an unseeing smile. Over and over again, his gaze scans the rippling crowd, settles on an upturned face. He makes eye contact and then he smiles.
He gestures to the young woman straining from the balcony of her house: 8220;Your sari is pretty8221;. To another with a child in her arms, he mimes: 8220;Is he asleep?8221; He seeks permission to wear his dark glasses from someone else in the crowd by pointing to the blinding sun. When it is not forthcoming, he takes the glasses off, along with the cap a concerned aide has handed him. Later during a break in the van8217;s narrow air conditioned room, Chiranjeevi remonstrates with him, 8220;If I wear both cap and glasses, what will they see?8221;.
They come to run alongside his van in large numbers and to gaze at him and roar their disapproval when he looks away. But will they vote for him? In Andhra Pradesh politics, ever since Chiranjeevi launched his Praja Rajyam party in August and upset the well settled routines of the state8217;s two-horse race, that8217;s the question.
It8217;s not a question Chiranjeevi is unaware of, or one that he discounts. In speech after speech, he challenges them, 8220;Have you come here to see me because I am a movie star? Is that why you are here?8221;
It is almost as if the star who is taking on an ambitious new role is worried that his audience might be role-playing too.
It is misleading to call them his audience. There is nothing passive about the young men mobilised by Chiranjeevi8217;s party. Their sheer physical energy defines his megastardom. They garland his cutouts and feed the poor when his films release. As part of his 7,500 registered fan associations across the state, they organise and participate in blood and eye donation camps. During his roadshow, they line the route and fill the roads, and teeter dangerously on ledges and poles. They don8217;t seek his attention as much as demand it. And barely listen to him when he speaks.
Chiranjeevi admits that one of the reasons for the not-so-impressive box office performance of his last two releases, remakes of Bollywood8217;s Munnabhai series, is that his fans could not bear to see their 8216;Megastar8217; preach non-violence. They love him in and as Tagore, the 2003 blockbuster in which he plays a professor who takes it on himself to eliminate corruption8212;literally. Tagore kidnaps disreputable officials and kills the most corrupt of the lot. Tagore is only a variation of Chiranjeevi8217;s most celebrated role for the most part of his three-decade-old film career8212;the angst-ridden rebel who singlehandedly takes on the rotten System, and lays it low.
8220;The fans8217; unregulated energy must be channellised,8221; says Dr P. Mitra Reddy, a surgeon and former member of the CPM who has given up both his politics and his practice to be part of Chiranjeevi8217;s core team 8220;from Day 18221;. Travelling with the star on the roadshow, Mitra keeps a watchful eye on the number of painkillers Chiranjeevi is taking, and often completes the star8217;s sentences for him. 8220;Before we launched the political party in August, we formed SPARC8212;the Socio Political Analysis and Research Centre8212;to train fans, make them into a political cadre. They were given classes in anger management and personality development.8221;
The frenetic energy of the fan is in eyecatching contrast to this patient planning and long calculation at the heart of Praja Rajyam. Some political watchers in Hyderabad insist that Chiranjeevi has plotted his political move over 15 years. Others say he has been testing the political waters since eight months at least, when Telugu paper Andhra Jyothy first started showcasing speculative reports on his shift to politics.
Taking a break inside the van in between rooftop appearances, Chiranjeevi is defiant: 8220;I take up to two months to sign a film. I read and reread scripts.8221; The idea of a wider platform first came to him 10 years ago, he says, when he launched the Chiranjeevi Charitable Trust that runs eye and blood donation banks across the state.
But Chiranjeevi was rehearsing his lines for politics in other ways. 8220;I have played lower caste characters in films8212;BCs, SCs, STs. My image took me close to people8217;s hearts.8221; The career switch could not have happened if he had only played the romantic hero, he says. Now, having entered politics, Chiranjeevi wears only white shirts. 8220;I used to wear other colours earlier. It seems irresponsible to do that now.8221;
It was different when NTR plunged into politics, remembers I. Venkat Rao, veteran political columnist in Hyderabad. 8220;NTR came with a fearless bang. I was there when he addressed his first political press conference on March 21, 1982. Just eight days later, on March 29, he announced his political party, almost as an on-the-spot decision. It was the beginning of people8217;s politics in Andhra Pradesh.8221;
NTR8217;s moment has passed in Andhra Pradesh. He won an encompassing mandate that brought an end to Congress dominance at a time when the state8217;s many cleavages were papered over by a surge of 8216;Telugu pride8217;. But today, Telugu identity is fractured more than ever before. The polity is divided along caste and regional lines and Chiranjeevi must fight for space in a field carved out between the two established parties, Reddy-dominated Congress and Kamma-dominated TDP.
By all accounts, Chiranjeevi hopes to rally his caste, the Kapus, as the core of a political coalition of backward castes. More a region-specific title than a caste, the Kapus are numerically significant8212;by one estimate, Kapus and affiliated sub-castes make up 22 per cent of the population of the state. They are socially and economically like the Reddys and the Kammas, but with one vital difference8212;Kapus have yet to get a chief minister of their own.
Along with 8220;social justice8221;, Chiranjeevi promises 8220;change8221;. What does he mean? What is change anyway in a state beset by a long-running agrarian crisis and home to such congealed political legacies as the demand for Telangana and Naxalism? Then, there is the identity politics that overtook AP in the 1990s8212;be it the several backward caste assertions or the Mala versus Madiga tug of war within the Scheduled Castes.
The demand for Telangana in particular may prove decisive in the state8217;s next election, says G. Krishna Reddy, who teaches political science in Hyderabad8217;s Osmania University. 8220;The tension between the two emotional expressions of 8216;8217;Vishal Andhra8217; and 8216;Telangana8217; was never really resolved,8221; he points out8212;neither at the moment of the birth of the state in 1956, which brought together Telugu-speaking parts of the British Empire8217;s Madras province with the Nizam-ruled Hyderabad state, nor in the over five decades of electoral politics since. But a series of events8212;most recently the birth of the TRS in 2001 and the inclusion of the demand for Telangana in the Congress manifesto after it joined hands with the TRS in 20048212;have brought it to the fore again. 8220;The 1980s was a sleepy period for the Telangana question. But it is driving politics again since the 1990s,8221; says Reddy.
8220;Change need not be something unimaginable,8221; says Chiranjeevi. 8220;We don8217;t know when the bus will come, or the water to the fields8230; It8217;s like living with a blindfold on. Change is the bus and the electricity arriving on time.8221; And Telangana? 8220;We have said that if the people want it, we will not come in the way.8221;
It8217;s a pattern that runs through his speeches during the day. Chiranjeevi seldom mentions the big problems by their name. Essentially, his message is: 8220;I am the white paper8230; You write on it whatever you think will make your lives better.8221;
It8217;s possible that Andhra Pradesh8217;s newest political force is strategically keeping the message simple. Chiranjeevi may have realised that the Necessity of Chiranjeevi in the absence of a political vacuum can only lie in this: a tiredness if not a sense of claustrophobia with the way things are; a yearning for an unnamed alternative to the Congress that has always been there and the TDP that has been around long enough. The TDP, incidentally, is currently engaged in wiping out its own past by political somersaults on issues ranging from economic reform to Telangana.
8220;Because he is new8221; and 8220;because he should be given a chance8221;, is the most frequent answer given by those who say they will vote for Chiranjeevi when the time comes, in the crowds that turn out on the roadshow8217;s Day 6. Maybe Chiranjeevi realises that if he puts a name to this urge to wipe the slate clean, this desire for a political Elsewhere, he does so at his own peril. He may lose the impulse, or drive it away.
We are 90 per cent non-political,8221; says T. Chandrashekhar, about Chiranjeevi8217;s core team. 8220;Ours is the only party whose core team is mostly made up of experienced professionals, bureaucrats, doctors8212;not politicians,8221; says the high-profile Maharashtra cadre IAS officer who resigned from service in September, and joined the roadshow for the first part of Day 6.
Praja Rajyam is a party in the making. Chiranjeevi as president is followed by two spokespersons, Dr Mitra Reddy, who is travelling on the roadshow and P. Prabhakar, TV anchor and political commentator. The party has yet to fill in the blanks after that.
Some key persons waiting for posts, apart from Chandrashekhar, are: Anjaneya Reddy, former IG, intelligence, Andhra Pradesh; P. Vinay Kumar, another medical doctor, also on the roadshow; Subbaiah Chaudhry, recently resigned from the IRS.
8220;I tendered my resignation because I realised that politicians would not allow me to do my work8230;We have many talented bureaucrats but they are not allowed to function. The political system has become totally corrupt,8221; says Chandrashekhar.
8220;I come from a political family but I was never interested in politics. In fact, I used to keep away from it8230; I wanted to serve the people,8221; says Vinay Kumar. He joined Praja Rajyam, he says, because 8220;this will be a service-based rather than a 8216;political8217; party.8221; He is certain that 8220;Chiranjeevi will not allow politicians the upper hand8221;.
A thread seems to bind the men in Chiranjeevi8217;s team. They have in common a disavowal of politics even as they make their political debut.
For Praja Rajyam, the easy part is over. The first phase of the roadshow has travelled through the three coastal districts of Srikakulam, Visakhapatnam and Vijayanagaram. This is Kapu territory8212;they are a dominant presence in seven districts of the coastal belt that has 100 seats and traditionally votes for a single party, a la Tamil Nadu. But what will happen when Chiranjeevi steps outside the coastal belt? In Rayalseema? And more crucially in the 10 districts of Telangana? Will his appeal spill over to those regions as well?
It8217;s 7:50 p.m., on Day 6 of the praja ankita yatra. The convoy has reached the small town of Chodavaram, the second last stop of the day. As Chiranjeevi addresses the crowd from the roof of the van, many powerful lights trained on him, K.S.N. Murthy watches the star, standing outside a nearby provision shop.
Murthy is an anganwadi worker and a proud Chiru fan. He frames the choice that is certain to be sharpened in Andhra Pradesh in the days and months to come. 8220;I have watched one film of his 28 times, and another 18 times over. I copy his dance style.8221; So will he vote for him? 8220;He8217;s just started. He has to prove himself. Maybe next time8230;8221;
