Jayalalithaa is dead: TN CM leaves behind void politics will find difficult to fill

Chennai: In the passing of Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the late Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, it’s not the state that is now facing a void. National politics per se is facing a void that is most difficult to fill, in contemporary terms of Centre-state relations and regional party equations at the national level. It would be even more so for her party, the AIADMK, and for the Tamil Nadu polity, in relative terms.

For starters, the state polity and elections will not be the same again. Though supposedly centred on Jaya now, and her political mentor, MG Ramachandran (MGR) earlier, Tamil Nadu politics since DMK’s Karunanidhi became chief minister in 1969, has remained Karunanidhi-centric. In context, the AIADMK under MGR first, and Jaya later on, became central to anti-Karunanidhi politics, with religion and corruption becoming the twin electoral focal points. It’s another matter that corruption thrived through the regimes of MGR and Jaya, too.

Today, when Jaya is no more, and there is no successor to take the AIADMK forward to comfortable electoral wins on its own steam that she alone had achieved in ‘Dravidian Tamil Nadu’ without any major alliance partner, there is a political vacuum that cannot be filled. With Karunanidhi too aging, and also ailing from time to time, and also becoming less and less relevant to DMK’s internal politics viz son MK Stalin, Jaya’s exit may have thrown up new equations, which are however, yet to take shape.

Whether or not they consolidate, and that the future may look unstable for political and electoral Tamil Nadu is a point to ponder, over the coming months and possibly years. If so, why, if not, why not are the kind of questions that have been asked within closed circles almost since Jaya was hospitalised on 22 September — at times as if the people who raked up such questions did not have a heart.

Born into a relatively affluent family, where mother Sandhya ended up having to shift base to Chennai from royal Mysuru, to eke out a living, Jaya followed in her footsteps to become a film heroine when she was still in her early teens. Through her years dominating the South Indian film industry, most especially Tamil, she ended up becoming the most sought-after gal of Kollywood long before the Kodambakkam tinsel town got the name, borrowed from Bollywood, in turn from Hollywood.

Chosen by MGR, a superstar of all times in Indian cinema, who went on to repeat the success in electoral politics in his time, after splitting away from the DMK parent in 1972, first as his heroine of choice in the mid-1960s and later as political heir and successor, Jaya did not fail him, or herself, or her producers or the cadres and voters. Yet, when it came to living her life, she was aloof and distant in her school days, possibly from childhood scars which mother Sandhya never possibly got the time of the day to see and heal.

All of it only went on to make a great success of Jaya as a politician first, and a greater success as chief minister and AIADMK supremo. To be fair, MGR had made aloofness from the second line his own trait after forming the AIADMK, possibly not trusting all those that had deserted the DMK and Karunanidhi, when the wind was favourable to him. If Jaya’s aloofness had made her a bibliophile of sorts in childhood and later as a film star, as a face from the tinsel town, her depth, knowledge and presentation as a party member of the Rajya Sabha, by MGR, brought her respect and regard from political Delhi, which is as vicious as it is appreciative. Jaya won good friends in her time, but would not allow anyone to walk with her as equals, possibly a trait she had told an interviewer she might have borrowed from Indira Gandhi, a kind of ‘role model’ for her.

This, she would repeat, with greater frequency and lesser elan, nearer home, stamping down personality ladders that had helped her climb up, at times even against their collective mentor in the unquestionable MGR. Incumbent state Congress president, S Thirunavukkarasar, was one of them within the AIADMK, where he had originally belonged — but he is not the only one. As Jaya lay in state, and a stream of cadres and visitors trooped down around the body, the question would be asked by each one of them, to the next in murmurs — and to himself or herself, with deep introspection. Apart from the anti-Karunanidhi politics that MGR perfected in his time, what all did she stand for, or fight for? To put it mildly, it was simply nothing.

To say that Jaya and the AIADMK on the one hand and the DMK on the other divided the state between themselves, and hence the state-driven pan-Tamil polity of decades, owes as much to the rest of them all than the ‘Big Two’, whether as parties or personalities. Suffice it to point out that none of them had the charisma (built over years), political acumen that others did not possess, and more importantly, or a sense of timing and purpose, with which others were unwilling to experiment. That way, Jaya was the right person, at the right time for a party that was orphaned after MGR’s death, and split vertically between her and MGR’s widow, the late Janaki Ramachandran.

If Janaki took with her the dubious record of being chief minister for the shortest period, Jaya holds the perfect record for winning two Assembly elections in a row since becoming chief minister for the first time in 1991. If Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination was a contributory factor, she was not the one to yield ground. Her period as an ally, first of the Congress and of the BJP, later on, saw her weakening them in the state primarily and at the national-level, otherwise.

Former prime ministers PV Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee are examples of how Jaya would want to dictate terms, whatever they be, and would not think twice, to give them a shock-treatment of the political kind, despite the AIADMK being a political beneficiary of the existing alliances of those times. Yet, it was this approach of hers, defying the laws of political nature, that also caused her intermittent doom.

Thus, only after the late Kumaraswamy Raja in 1952, Jayalalithaa became the only Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, to have lost an Assembly election, not only for the party, but her own seat — Bargur in Dharmapuri district (1996). It also meant that for over a decade when alliance politics was the order of the day at the national-level, the AIADMK, and hence Jaya did not have any leverage.

If all this had meant that Jaya thought for her own, and acted for her own and for her party, she did prove her point in the 2014 General Election. When the rest of the nation voted Narendra Damodardas Modi for prime minister, in Jaya’s Tamil Nadu, they voted for the ‘lady’, instead. To the extent that she made every successive prime minister of her time call on her at her Poes Garden residence in the centre of Chennai, she had made her political point even more clear — yet, would not yield, neither politically nor electorally.

It’s thus that taking a leaf out of mentor MGR’s book that Jaya learnt how to go to the cadres over the head of the party, and to the masses over the head of even the cadres, possibly. It’s this that won the party for her after losing the post-MGR 1989 Assembly elections, with Janaki too fighting from the other side, but soon the cadres were with her, and the voters, later on. Jaya’s childhood aloofness has frightened her friends(?) and followers alike, an Indira Gandhi-esque quality that cadres on the one hand, women voters on the other, adored. It’s this that also made adversaries envious, and admirers followers of the lesson that she might have taught them without sitting across her and learning from a ‘teacher’ that she had become for many of the contemporary 21st Century Indian leaders.

Yet, all this also meant that she did develop a devil-may-care attitude, or got herself entrenched in avoidable litigation, consequent imprisonment and court-ordered loss of power. For in her dictionary, there did not seem to be any substitute for hard work on the one hand, and term-dictation on the other. It did not always work, and it meant that Jaya was as much chasing court cases throughout her political career as cadres were chasing her for a glimpse of her face, which was rare yet worth waiting for, and dying for, too. It is in this context that Jaya’s association with Sasikala will be remembered. While there were ups and downs, Jaya did not have many whom she could trust as much as she did her constant companion. So much so that when Jaya went to her end without an acquittal in the assets case, the death of A-1 could well mean that the case too could well go with her, and signal acquittal for Sasikala and company, who, unlike Jaya, are not ‘public servants’ as she was.

Though her only immediate blood relative, Divya, did not get to see her late father’s lone sibling through these past months of hospitalisation despite her repeated attempts, the fact that Jaya did not care for her shows how deeply entrenched Sasikala’s family has been in her life, at the very heart of the complex hive that was built around the regent, who died a queen: equal parts queen mother, queen bee, and, at times, queen of tragedy.

The author is director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, a multi-disciplinary Indian public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi.