Jayalalithaa a ruthless administrator who got the job done, but demanded absolute submission

When Jayalalithaa became Tamil Nadu chief minister in 1991, one of her first acts was to introduce the ‘Cradle Baby’ scheme, meant to reduce female infanticide, in the state’s Salem district. Throughout the country, one of the leading causes of female infanticide was poor parents’ inability to take care of their daughters, seeing them as a financial burden. But under the Tamil Nadu government’s new scheme, parents could anonymously leave unwanted female babies in white-painted cradles kept outside the district’s 116 clinics. The argument was to donate the child to the State instead of killing them. In February 1993, I travelled to Salem to see if the scheme was working. It was. In the first two months after the cradles’ installation, 18 female babies were given up. The scheme was later extended to other parts of the state. [caption id=“attachment_3144570” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Jayalalithaa often resembled a megalomaniac. PTI file image[/caption] The last time I looked at the figures was five years ago, by which time the number of “cradle babies” was hovering around 4,000. They had been dispatched to children’s homes and were leading a life as orphans. This was one of the earliest schemes Jayalalithaa had introduced, in her first term as CM, to end what she had been calling “male domination” of the society.  She had begun to talk about “male domination” back in 1989, when ruling DMK legislators assaulted her and pulled her sari in the Tamil Nadu Assembly, two years after her mentor and AIADMK founder MG Ramachandran died. It was right then that she vowed to become the CM herself. Her government was also the first to reserve 30 percent of police jobs for women and to establish all-women police stations. For the upliftment of women, she also came up with sundry other schemes which were later copied by other states. On one side, you see in Jayalalithaa a woman who was the personification of authoritarianism. In fact, she often seemed like a megalomaniac, she was the epicentre of her own universe. Sacking ministers and transferring officials at her whim and fancy, she demanded and achieved total submission from the party cadre. She thumbed her nose at other chief ministers and even prime ministers whenever they raised her hackles, and her attitude at times bordered on arrogance. But on the other hand, she was an able and efficient administrator who came up with innovative schemes, though the long-term benefits of some of these are debatable. And no doubt, she worked very hard. She was one of the few chief ministers — if not the only one I have come across — who work from morning to night, seven days a week, seeing files or meeting people or travelling. Killer 2004 tsunami Her ability to rise to the occasion in times of crisis was evident when a massive tsunami struck India and other SouthEast Asian countries on 26 December, 2004. In India, Tamil Nadu suffered the brunt, with about 8,000 people killed and lakhs of people displaced. I arrived in Nagapattinam (which alone accounted for more than 5,000 deaths in Tamil Nadu) late that night and stayed there for close to a month to cover a tragedy of gigantic proportions. On the coast, hundreds of entire homes were washed away and roads were filled with sea water. On what was once a beach, there were now helmets, utensils, clothes, coins, toys and even cars half-buried in sand. Bodies were strewn everywhere. Hundreds of fishing boats anchored at the coast were wrecked by the surging tidal waves. Some days, it was difficult to arrive at the precise number of people killed, women who lost husbands who had gone fishing and children who lost both parents. At first, the relief operation was tardy, considering the scale of the tragedy, but Jayalalithaa lost no time in personally taking charge of the situation. She handpicked officials to supervise relief and rehabilitation work. It was a pleasant surprise to see the speed with which the official machinery swung into action. Within 48 hours, select officials from across the state were mobilised to converge on the worst-affected areas near Nagapattinam and Cuddalore. Soon, the streets were being cleared and hundreds of decomposed bodies were being recovered from the debris of half-destroyed houses. Medical camps were set up to inoculate people against possible epidemics. And even as all this was going on, Jayalalithaa was busy drawing up plans to build thousands of homes for those who were rendered homeless. She constantly coordinated the operations from Chennai. When some said the relief was too slow, she called them “nincompoops”. She lost the 2006 Assembly election for a variety of other reasons, but the proactive chief minister left her mark on the state with her work during four terms, interrupted twice by court verdicts which saw O Pannerselvam take her place. The long list of her welfare schemes did make significant impact on various sections of people, and even if they didn’t turn Tamil Nadu into a heaven on earth, her achievements on the several fronts like law and order, electricity generation and attracting investments in industry are no less admirable. Pannerselvam has a lot to do to protect or build on this legacy.