Tamil Nadu cocktail

The Bharatiya Janata Party is too busy congratulating itself on the coup it has pulled off in Tamil Nadu to pause and think of this. But th...

The Bharatiya Janata Party is too busy congratulating itself on the coup it has pulled off in Tamil Nadu to pause and think of this. But the smart, tactical move may well prove a strategic setback. The electoral alliance the party has entered into with the All-India Anna DMK of J. Jayalalitha can only compound the damage done to the BJP’s image by its recent exercises in realpolitik in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere.

This is the first time the BJP has managed an alliance with a major political player in the State where it has been the weakest. The achievement, it can be argued, strengthens its claim to present a national alternative. The new ties can be said to make it more touchable, dramatically so for being forged with a Dravidian party of traditionally acute antipathy to all that the BJP is supposed to stand for.

The possibility of short-term political gains from the alliance for the party, in terms of its parliamentary strength in these times of chronic instability, cannot be ruled out, either. All this does not argue away the utter opportunism of this particular realignment that the party seeks in vain to sell as part of a desirable, wider process.

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A measure of the political cynicism behind the pact is provided by the fact that the party has felt obliged to deny abandonment of its electoral anti-corruption plank. However, the denial will have little credibility until and unless the BJP adopts and affirms a principled stand on issues involving the phenomenal corruption of the Jayalalitha regime on which the judgement of Tamil Nadu’s electorate has been emphatically clear. Such a stand is unlikely given the fact that the BJP did not give a hoot to Jayalalitha’s recent indictment in a corruption case. The party, which has repeatedly asserted its resolve to make an election issue of the Jain Commission report and not to let the Congress evade it, has also not cared to explain how its stand in the matter can be reconciled with Jayalalitha’s.

Will the BJP now revise its unfavourable view of the report and the related Congress campaign that has forced the coming polls on the country and back the AIADMK attempt to use the document for DMK-bashing?

The alliance involves opportunism on the AIADMK’s part as well. It runs counter not only to the party’s avowed Dravidian ideology but also to the deep political meaning claimed for its decades of friendship with the Congress in the days of M.G. Ramachandran. It is true that under her leadership, the AIADMK had lost much of its claim to being a true Dravidian party.

She did not even mind supporting the BJP’s Ayodhya cause at a meeting of the National Integration Council five years ago. Even so, the alliance represents a reversal of all that she and her party have stood for. But then, no one expected greater consistency from the Jayalalitha camp that includes her enemies of such erstwhile staunchness as the Janata Party of Subramanian Swamy (of anti-BJP stridency) and the Marumalarchi DMK of V. Gopalsamy (of a militantly pro-LTTE past). What a cocktail the four-party alliance would be!