After MGR, Jaya, who? ADMK battles with the legacy question

MGR didn’t have to guarantee; he was the guarantee. His presence was the promise. Since his death in December 1987, his legacy has become the biggest asset of the AIADMK organisation that he left behind. His wife Janaki first staked claim to it and was sworn in as the state’s first woman CM.

MGR and his wife Janaki, who went on to become Tamil Nadu’s first woman CM. (Express archive)

Janaki’s record-setting tenure lasted all of 24 days, only to end in open battle on the floor of the House that failed to express trust in the CM. The next claimant to the guaranteed legacy, J Jayalalithaa, proved to be a worthier successor.

She reshaped the party as her own fief, holding on to the MGR link. The link would be brought up close to every poll. Pundits would reevaluate the inevitable incremental fall in the “MGR vote” as fans of the legendary actor aged.

This segment, an unusual posthumous vote-catching category built around screen image, was seen as giving the Jaya party its edge over the DMK, which also competed for more or less the same Dravidian vote base.

As of today, eight years after Jayalalitha’s death, her legacy is severely disputed. The official AIADMK with the two leaves symbol belongs to the group led by Edappadi Palanisamy – at least for now, thanks to Madras High Court’s refusal to intervene.

The ultimate decision will come from the “people’s court”, say the claimants to the Jaya legacy as they hit the road in this poll season. Of the lot, the one to provide the kind of grand spectacle reminiscent of Jayalalithaa’s days seems to be the AMMK’s T T V Dhinakaran, who is canvassing for O Panneerselvam, Jayalalithaa’s favourite CM choice whenever she ran afoul of the law.

A campaign in Mudukulathur town that is part of the Ramanathapuram seat. (Sketch by EP Unny)

On Wednesday, it took a while to figure out why hundreds of thousands of people thronged the modest Mudukulathur town square in Ramanathapuram to watch a half-an-hour roadshow. The campaign was being aggressively recorded by commissioned professionals on every conceivable optical device.

There were digital camera teams on the road, and on verandahs of the low-rise shops. From high above, a drone was taking menacing dives. After all this, if there was any other image left to grab, a camera crew on a crane did it in rapid action.

The place resembled a film shoot location and the crowds had to register as impressive “background actors”, as they are called in the movie lexicon. The real campaign, however, is online. On the last lap of the polls, the edited shoot will play without deadline in endless loops on Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube.

Apart from occasional cheering, the background actors stood watching in silence. They weren’t the only ones to have no lines. The candidate didn’t utter a single word through the entire proceedings.

Dinakaran did all the talking, while Panneerselvam emerged from an adjacent campaign vehicle and watched quietly with folded hands. The only time his hands moved were when he held up a jackfruit, the symbol he had to settle for from among the sundry lot the Election Commission earmarks for party-less Independents.

The good old “guarantee” that was once central to Tamil political discourse has turned into a gamble for the state’s political space, which has become even more crowded than Maharashtra’s. Here, there is a second national party, the BJP, and one too many regional players.