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Journalism of Courage
The election season is upon Tamil Nadu – even if a bypoll – and it’s easy to see it in the air.
The stakes are high, with Congress veteran E V K S Elangovan, backed by its ally DMK, taking on the AIADMK candidate backed by the BJP, in Erode seat. Traditionally, bypolls go the ruling party’s way. However, the Congress is largely a spent force in Tamil Nadu while the BJP is a spending one; and if the former is riding on DMK shoulders, the other is watching over the AIADMK’s.
So, all bets are off as the two Dravidian majors, DMK and AIADMK, deploy all their might – money to men.
It’s a long way from the time Tamil Nadu’s politics revolved around the self-respect movement, which also spawned the various Dravidian political parties. Now the state is often identified with terms such as the ‘Thirumangalam Formula’, for innovative ways to “influence” voters – ranging from distribution of currency notes in instalments, to tokens to buy groceries, to saris and biryani.
The term came from the 2009 election to the Thirumangalam Assembly seat in Madurai district, when cash was said to have been delivered to voters in envelopes concealed in morning newspapers.
The word in Erode East this time is that the system is “fully decentralised” and “fully digitalised”, with money changing hands over UPI payments – discreetly and untraceably.
If money is allegedly taken care of, the men’s side is hard at work too. The DMK has on the ground all its top leaders, including 15 of the 30-odd ministers for the Erode bypoll, divided into eight teams. While three-four senior ministers are in-charge overall, others have got defined tasks: two Muslim ministers are reaching out to the minority community (Erode East has about 50,000 minority votes); three Dalit ministers are focusing on the Scheduled Caste population (around 7%, belonging to different SC/ST sects); and two ministers and senior non-political faces from the DMK’s first family are looking at specifically the 15,000 to 20,000 Gounder votes.
One minister says tracking each voter is now almost like a science. “We have looked at almost all voters, know the caste composition (in each locality) by heart, and each of us is personally speaking with as many voters as we can,” says the minister.
Another minister compares the effort to that of kings who in folk tales would disguise themselves as commoners to go to the people to gauge the public mood. As per the minister, the break-up is: “More than a dozen ministers, district secretaries and MLAs under them, union and branch secretaries below them, and each union secretary directly handling 100-150 votes… that is how we reach every voter in 230 booths.”
In the case of the AIADMK, the groundwork is almost the same – except instead of ministers, it has former ministers, with former CM and the party’s leader, Edappadi K Palaniswami, monitoring it personally. A former AIADMK minister jokes, “If we had taken this much effort in governance, Tamil Nadu wouldn’t have been the second or third, but the first and best in India.”
Political observers may lament about the nature of politics in India now – a seamless transition from land-based feudalism of old, to political feudalism now, with the levers of power largely in the same hands and oiled by the same mechanism.
Back in 1925, Walter Lippman argued in his book The Phantom Public that a society built on severe social and economic inequalities, without democratic political practices and fundamental rights for people, would be defeated by cultural practices that people are more familiar with.
However, in Tamil Nadu, the lament for what could have been perhaps hurts even more, given the history of Periyar-led self-respect movement, and its goal of striving towards equality. Now, its progeny, DMK and AIADMK, themselves are pictures of the new feudal lords.
