On the long flight from the United States to Mumbai tonight, Vaiko must have surely travelled a little back in time. Because long before POTO became POTA at the joint session of Parliament, Vaiko told a meeting of the Home Ministry’s parliamentary consultative committee that it was ‘‘a bitter pill which must be swallowed’’ post-September 11. CPI(M) veteran Somnath Chatterjee’s taunt, spoken in jest during a House debate, must also be ringing in his ears: Be careful you may become a victim of POTO one day. He, the firebrand MDMK leader, had then paid no heed, dismissing it with a shrug to vote for the controversial law. Vaiko knew he was treading dangerous ground. While trying to sell the bitter pill at the parliamentary panel meeting on November 23 last year, he couldn’t conceal his apprehension of POTO’s potential misuse. Recalling the bitter experience with the enforcement of the Preventive Detention Act, the Defence of India Act, MISA and TADA, Vaiko called for changes: • Scrap the POTO clause which compels journalists to name the source of information; • The provision which calls for confessional statements before a magistrate within 48 hours of the arrest should be altered to read 24 hours; • Redefine ‘‘meeting’’ under the Act as this could be misused by police. Despite his inner fears, Vaiko went around promoting POTO. He explained to Chennai that the Centre was ‘‘forced to bring it to contain religious terrorism.’’ That POTO should not be confused with MISA because ‘‘MISA was introduced to protect the Congress government and Indira Gandhi while POTO was promulgated for the unity and integrity of the country.’’ But that was before POTO became law. Now the Jayalalithaa government will cite his love for the LTTE and the consequent threat to ‘‘the unity and integrity’’ to give him a taste of the bitter pill. There has always been a touch of high drama to Vaiko’s politics. From his espousal of the Sri Lankan Tamils’ cause to doing ideological about-turns. Even to changing his name from Vai. Gopalsamy to the abbreviation Vaiko. In the early nineties, he was the rising star of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, giving sleepless nights to party chief M Karunanidhi who saw in him a future challenge to his son Stalin’s emergence as his successor. An excellent organiser who had the magnetism to attract the youth, Vaiko couldn’t have survived in the DMK for long. More than anything else, it is his ardent advocacy of an independent Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka that made him popular as well as controversial. When he sneaked into the Jaffna peninsula to meet Tamil Tigers’ chief V.Prabhakaran, Karunanidhi found the right opportunity to make Vaiko’s continuance in the DMK untenable. Karunanidhi said his clandestine visit did not have the party’s sanction. Soon Vaiko parted ways to launch his own Marumalarchi DMK. He began trying to create an alternative niche for himself in the Dravidian politics of Tamil Nadu which has revolved round the DMK and the AIADMK. In 1995, he toured some 1,500 km in the State whipping up a wave of anti-Jayalalitha sentiment and highlighting her five-year misrule between 1991 and 1996. But two years later, he joined hands with the same Jayalalitha and her alliance which included the BJP in 1998. And ever since, he has become probably the BJP’s most dependable ally never throwing a tantrum, very unlike Mamata Banerjee or Chandrababu Naidu. An unabashed admirer of Prime Minister A B Vajpayee, he has rarely disappointed the BJP even when other ‘‘secular’’ allies went on the warpath on issues like Ayodhya and Gujarat. In debate after debate, Vaiko has strongly defended the BJP-led government, often putting the putting the onus on the Opposition. While at the Centre, all the three Dravidian parties are on the same side of the BJP, the politics in Tamil Nadu is entirely different. For months now Vaiko has been aggressively opposing many of the actions of the Jayalalitha government which explains her animus towards him.
