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Journalism of Courage
Jayalalithaa knows better than most that even as her own cinematic origins are irrelevant to her present political standing, so is Sonia Gandhi8217;s place of birth of no relevance to her place in our political firmament. For, notwithstanding Sun TV8217;s relentless efforts at diurnally portraying Jayalalithaa gyrating around trees in a manner that would make your average Tamil mami blush, Jayalalithaa is and remains chief minister of Tamil Nadu with the largest majority ever secured.
Indeed, talk of origins coming from the leader of the AIADMK is particularly rich. The Tamil Dravidian movement was founded by a Telugu-speaking Naidu with origins in Andhra Pradesh. MGR was a Malayalee Nair, born in Ceylon. Jayalalithaa herself is of Mysorean origin. She is a Brahmin leading an anti-Brahmin movement. She is a diehard Hindu leading an ideology founded in aggressive atheism. She is a Hindi-speaker in a party which regards speaking Hindi as tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. She stands atop a tangled ladder of contradictions.
Jayalalithaa is far too intelligent and shrewd 8212; another contradiction given the lumpen mob she leads 8212; to have fired her salvo only out of pique, especially when she well knew that her letter to the Rashtrapati of April 1999 pledging her support to Sonia Gandhi as PM was bound to be dusted out of the archives. I leave it to psychologists to fathom the pathological origins of her dislike of Sonia Gandhi. I prefer to speculate on the possible political causes.
First, the timing. Jayalalithaa8217;s outburst came a fortnight after the merger of the Tamil Maanila Congress and the Indian National Congress. It also came in the very week that Karunanidhi blew the bugle to signal the outbreak of the mediaeval war of succession going on in the ranks of the DMK. The minute he announced that it was time for the older generation of DMK leaders to yield to a younger generation, his elder son, Azhagiri, headquartered in Madurai, and his younger son Stalin, headquartered nearer the durbar in Chennai, sent out their hordes, like Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb, to join battle in the streets. A split in the DMK is inevitable.
In the normal course, a split in the DMK would be the desire closest to Jayalalithaa8217;s heart. Unfortunately for her, the forthcoming split virtually coincides with the Phoenix-like rise of the Congress in Tamil Nadu. The resurgence of the Congress as a single party presages two major developments. One, the restoration of a plus-minus 20 per cent Congress vote, without which neither Dravidian party can hope to come to power.
All election results since the mid-70s split in the original DMK show that each of the two successor parties retains about a third of the Tamil vote, the DMK being ahead of the AIADMK by a whisker. Only a Congress alliance can take either over the top. Jayalalithaa8217;s massive victory in the 2001 assembly elections owed everything to the rainbow coalition she put together which reduced the DMK virtually to its own, thus ensuring the victory of the AIADMK-led alliance.
Since Jayalalithaa chose to treat the alliance8217;s victory as an AIADMK victory, her winning alliance has since disintegrated. The TMC-Congress merger in Madurai on August 14 proved the last nail driven into the coffin of that alliance. This was not only because the TMC was no longer available to Jayalalithaa to play off against the Congress but also because Sonia Gandhi announced that the united Congress would be hoeing its own furrow.
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Jayalalithaa8217;s attack on Sonia Gandhi may be seen as her perverse way of acknowledging her new challenger on the Tamil Nadu and national horizons |
The disintegration of the DMK means the Congress is no longer obliged to cobble together a Third Front in Tamil Nadu; it is poised to emerge as the Second Front. With each of the rump DMK factions reduced to a lower position in Tamil electoral fortunes than the Congress, and the united Congress on its own less than ten percentage points behind the AIADMK, the next elections may well see a Congress-led front take on an AIADMK-front, perhaps even with one of the two DMK rumps in tow.
As if this is not cause enough for alarm, there is also a national angle to Jayalalithaa ko kyon gussa aata hai. She, in common with other regional rumps, dreams of a return to a political order where the smaller parties hold the larger ones to political ransom in Delhi. She sees herself as the Chandrababu Naidu of the 14th Lok Sabha, leading arbiter of a Third Front as in the Gowda-Gujral era, only more likely than Naidu to make it herself to PM. Her hopes now stand dashed. Recent moves towards a political understanding among the parties of the Opposition in Parliament show that it is not a Third Front but a Second that is more likely to take on the NDA. Desperate to stall a Congress-led Second Front in Tamil Nadu, and equally desperate to promote a Third Front led by herself in Delhi, Jayalalithaa8217;s vicious personal attack on Sonia Gandhi might be seen as her perverse way of acknowledging her new challenger on the Tamil Nadu and national political horizons.
If I was virtually alone in the English-language media in predicting Jayalalithaa8217;s overwhelming win in last year8217;s state assembly elections, let me now venture a second prediction 8212; that history will date the beginning of her coming political eclipse to the press conference she held on August 28.
Write to msaiyarexpressindia.com
