The decline of Amma: Hope for DMK as Jayalalithaa falls from all time high

The legal setback from the Bangalore special court to Jayalalithaa came at a time when politically she was at her peak. Ever since she came back to power in Tamil Nadu in 2011, her popularity has been on the rise and right now, she is literally unassailable. The DMK camp will be certainly overjoyed because they think that the possible disruption that her absence — both because of her current jail term till she gets bail and her inability to contest for ten years — could help them regain some lost ground. While Jaya has been on an all-time high, the DMK has been on all all-time low with absolutely nothing redeeming in sight. [caption id=“attachment_1733793” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Tamil Nadu CM Jayalalithaa’s supporters in Chennai. Reuters[/caption] The only development of consequence right now for the AIADMK, besides obvious grief of the cadres and leaders of seeing Jaya in jail, is the succession plan. Who will be the next chief minister is the most hotly debated and speculated issue among the AIADMK camp, the media and general public. Several names are doing the rounds, the most prominent them being finance minister O Panneerselvam and former chief secretary and a close confidante Sheela Balakrishnan. The odds are apparently in favour of Panneerselvam because he was the man Jaya picked as the interim chief minister when she had to stay out of power in 2001. Will she retain the same man, who is considered to be the senior most in the cabinet after her? Nobody can tell because the situation now is different from that in 2001 when Panneerselvam was mostly new and was untested. Jaya would have picked him because there was no threat to her from him. Reportedly, he still enjoys her trust and even acts as the interface between her and other ministers and leaders. So, will Jaya choose him yet again? Nobody knows except her. Regarding Sheela, she is supposedly among the three top bureaucrats that Jaya apparently trusted. Even months ahead of the verdict, it had been speculated that in case the court went against her, Jaya would run the government with Sheela as the front end. The same speculation is rife even now. Other names doing the rounds are less significant. Ultimately, it’s only Jaya who knows who will be the next chief minister. She is the only leader of the party, with no second or third in command, and she hasn’t told anybody what her plans are. With the verdict poised to go either way, she certainly would have thought about a name and the succession plan. It’s also safe to assume that she even would have thought about how to run the government from the jail. Probably it will be spelt out today or tomorrow. Political setbacks are not new to Jayalalithaa. Her initial rise to prominence itself was out of adversity when her mentor and former chief minister MGR died in 1987. Very few could have resisted the efforts by her rivals to purge her as she did. In four years, she became the chief minister of Tamil Nadu in a landslide victory that saw the complete rout of the DMK. The only DMK leader that was spared by her onslaught was Karunanidhi. In the next five years, mostly because of the alleged deeds of her friend Sasikala and her family who stayed within her household, Jaya squandered the public trust and goodwill and had to face real public wrath in the 1996 elections. There were cases galore, both by the state and central agencies, but she returned in style in 2001. She lost again in 2006, probably because of some of the unpopular and tactless decisions she took during her rule, only to return with remarkable public support in 2011. The DMK was routed yet again and was even pushed to the third spot in the assembly. In the subsequent elections to the Lok Sabha, her party won 37 out of 39 seats. What marked her rule this time were the pro-poor policies and the social welfare initiatives that she undertook. The Amma canteens that provided cooked meals at highly subsidised rates, the market interventions - whenever prices of essential commodities rose - such as the offloading of one lakh metric tonnes of rice in the market and setting up of special shops for selling vegetables that were procured from farmers directly, were hugely popular. Curiously, the last decision to sell 50 kg cement bags at Rs 190, came a day prior to the Bangalore court verdict. In terms of her policies, this time Jaya appeared to be a transformed leader who believed in social welfare and social protection. Although she was keen on investments and the overall industrial development of her state, the emphasis on targeting the poor and the marginalised was leitmotif of her success story. The public display of grief by her party workers, mostly women, read along with her welfare measures make a lot of sense. The verdict is certainly a setback, but not the end of the road as the DMK might want to believe. Continuing her style of governance, out of office, will be a challenge, but not impossible. Her future and the party’s success will depend on how best she institutes a system by which she can remote-control the government in the state.