Remember Jayalalithaa’s political success, but don't forget her corrupt legacy

It was an irony that Jayaram Jayalalithaa (her name is sometimes spelled Jayalalitha) was called the Puratchi Thalaivi (Revolutionary Leader). Jayalalithaa behaved — and she liked to be seen as well — as a 15th Century empress who walked down the royal palace with a host of minions prostrating themselves before her. A truly revolutionary leader — even a truly democratic leader — would have come down hard on such a practice, even if her followers thought that was the only way to show respect to her; but Jayalalithaa seemed to revel in this naked display of power and encouraged it as the standard public display of loyalty. She had that unashamed streak of a feudal leader. Like most feudal benefactors, she looked after the interest of her wards very well. The Amma Canteens and Amma Medicines have been the envy of political leaders in every other state and many state governments have devised schemes taking the cue from the Tamil Nadu experiment. [caption id=“attachment_3142306” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi. Reuters[/caption] In a largely feudal society like ours, for a woman to make it big in politics needs extraordinary talent and charisma. Jayalalithaa happened to be one of the three successful women politicians of India today who went on to become chief ministers, the other two being Mamata Banerjee and Mayawati. All three happened to be unmarried, with no immediate family encumbrances to face. Mamata’s success was on her own account. She had no godfather in politics. Mayawati had her political godfather in Kanshi Ram. Jayalalithaa was groomed by MG Ramachandran, her lead actor in several films and her mentor in Tamil Nadu politics, to be her successor. But she worked hard to step into the big shoes of a charismatic leader like MGR. But what distinguished Jayalalithaa, in a negative way, was a series of corruption charges against her. She had the dubious distinction of vacating the office of chief minister twice as the trial court found her guilty but she managed to return to office when a higher court stayed or dismissed the lower court order. In the TANSI case, she finally got relief from the Supreme Court. But in the disproportionate assets case, the matter is pending in the Supreme Court. She came back to office as the Karnataka High Court nullified the order of the trial court that had convicted Jayalalithaa and had sent her to jail. But there were innumerable cases of complicity in corrupt deals in which she was not legally indicted but her involvement was all over there for everyone to see. For her, the redeeming feature was that in all such deals she alone was not the accused; the accusing finger could be pointed against her fierce political rival, M Karunanidhi, the other mega star of the Tamil Nadu politics. Both the DMK and AIADMK governments helped institutionalise corruption in Tamil Nadu. And both were greatly helped with successive judicial interventions.

“It was not just the government system and the two major political parties that favoured the mining mafia; the judiciary too played a part, with over hundred orders favouring private miners; there were lots of stay orders issued against cancellation of licences or actions against miners.”

This indictment pointed to the plunder by the granite mining barons at Melur near Madurai in Tamil Nadu and the manner in which Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa, two political leaders at the helm of the state apparatus, facilitated the creation of an illegal mining empire in cahoots with the judiciary. Mind you, the above was not an indictment by a journalist or a social activist; it was the anguished voice of a former judge of the Madras High Court who had spoken to The Indian Express on record. It was a sordid story. In 1990, Jayalalithaa changed the mining law of the state and allowed private mining. And there emerged a mining baron, PR Palanichami, who built an illegal empire, with the Jayalalithaa government looking the other way. Not to be left behind, the grandson of her arch rival Karunanidhi, Dayanidhi, also entered the lucrative granite business when the DMK came to power. Palanichami’s PRP Granites and Dayanidhi’s Olympus Granites became the vehicles of plunder by these two ‘beloved’ leaders of the state. The plunder went on with impunity — with the local media also looking the other way as they were also in thrall to these larger-than-life leaders — until an RTI activist of Melur named S Murugesan filed an RTI queries in 2008 asking for information on the granite business of the PRP Group. As he did not get the answer he sought, Murugesan filed a petition in the Madras High Court. And here comes the dubious role of certain judges of the honourable court. Justice K Chandru, a retired judge of the Madras High Court, who had heard Murugesan’s petition in the court, was candid enough to speak to The Indian Express about the corruption in the higher judiciary: “We ordered an enquiry into PRP Granites’s exports for a year and found discrepancies there too – there was a huge difference between the volume he exported and what he was permitted to mine. PRP Granites filed an appeal against the probe and another bench of the court stayed it. That stay is still on.” With top politicians and top judges acting in unison to protect the illegal empire, the state exchequer lost a staggering Rs 16000 crore (an estimate by a daring Tamil Nadu cadre IAS officer, U Sagayam, who is supposed to have faced 24 transfers in 23 years for taking on corruption at high places. Now, with Jayalalithaa dead and Karunanidhi battling it out in another ICU in Chennai, Tamil Nadu has entered a new phase of politics. Hopefully, it will give rise to the dawn of a new brand of politics that is corruption-free.