TN voters vented their anger against 'K' family and Marans

By BV Rao In this age of instant analysis there is a tendency to capture even seminal events in one word, or at best, one phrase. So don’t be surprised if Jayalalithaa’s humongous victory in the elections to the Tamil Nadu assembly is reduced to one issue (corruption) leading to one old trend (swapping of governments every five years) repeating itself. To see the overthrow of the Karunanidhi clan in this narrow light is to miss the important pixels that compose this big picture. Tamil Nadu was actually very close to bucking this trend and corruption was almost a non-issue till just two months before polling date. [caption id=“attachment_9619” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“If the conditions for the family’s overthrow existed, it still needed a clean election. AFP Photo”]  [/caption] The K family was one happy, cocky enterprise having worked out the monetary equivalent of the Left Front’s scientific rigging of elections where everything and everybody had a fixed price. A price for voting for the DMK, a price for not voting for the AIADMK (staying home), a price for being a proxy candidate, etc, all of which was tried and tested very successfully in the Thirumangalam byelection, notorious nationwide for the part money played in it. The 2G scam has been routinely making headlines in the national media for the last two years, and more specifically since October 2010 when the CAG report put the cost of the 2G scam at a staggering Rs 1,76,000 crore. But in Tamil Nadu, home of the 2G scam so to say, it made no ripples. Actually, care was taken to see it made no ripples because the Karunanidhis and the Marans have a stranglehold on the media in the state. The country’s biggest scam, engineered by Karunanidhi’s handpicked Dalit face, A Raja, was never in the news. Even when Raja was forced to resign in November following the CAG report, only passing mention was made of the case but a big deal made out of a Dalit being hounded in big, bad Delhi. Thus far, even the Congress party was playing as per the script, steadfastly refusing to accept any wrong-doing in the 2G allocations and dragging its feet on the CBI investigations. But when the Supreme Court took direct charge of the investigations and forced the CBI to file the charge-sheet leading to Raja’s arrest on February 2, the whole dynamic changed and the DMK was hoisted by its own petard. And this is how it happened. In the five years of its rule, the DMK gave away nearly 1.9 crore colour televisions as part of its 2006 poll promise. So, Tamil Nadu became a state with one of the highest TV penetrations. While the family could black out the news of the 2G scam for as long as it did because the Marans are the cable kings of Tamil Nadu, the same high levels of penetration became a curse once the genie was out of the bottle and it became impossible to suppress the news after Raja’s arrest. (One interesting aside: While television companies would have had a great time supplying 1.9 crore TVs, it was the Marans’ cable networks - Sun Direct and Sumangali Cable Vision - that benefited the most because the DMK was careful not to promise free cable connections. So they now have an assured, recurring income, at the cost of the exchequer!) The floodgates opened and as the scam touched Karunanidhi’s family, the anger that was simmering for running the state like a family enterprise, thus far expressed only in private conversations, became the talking point and the tide turned.  Just to illustrate the kind of control the family, especially the Marans, had on the state, allow me to narrate a story told to me by a well-connected friend. It was around early 2009. A well known movie production banner had finished shooting and post-production of its latest movie and was readying it for a festival release when the owners received a call and were told that the Sun Group of the Marans would like to buy the ownership rights to the movie and release it under their banner. “Vettaikaran” (hunter). It was indeed released under the Sun banner. Such was the terror of the family. You couldn’t release a film without their blessing, you couldn’t print or broadcast news that they didn’t like, you couldn’t set up a business without payoffs. This pincer grip on the state by one family was most resented among the people, even if it did not get reflected in the media. This latent anger against the family needed a trigger and that came in the form of Raja’s inglorious arrest and the K family’s deep involvement in the scam. If the conditions for the family’s overthrow existed, it still needed a clean election.  That was a tough ask in a state where the Union Home Minister first “lost” the 2009 Lok Sabha election and mysteriously emerged as the winner an hour later! Additionally, the DMK had the money and muscle to ensure that popular anger died before it reached the ballot box. Jaya’s resources to take on the DMK’s money power were severely limited. That’s where, everybody admits, the Election Commission’s role has been laudable. It seized no less than Rs 64 crore in cash in the run up to the election, rendering useless the DMK’s most potent weapon. Election 2011 is being termed the cleanest election in a long time in Tamil Nadu. Its control on the state’s media gone, its money power neutralised by the Election Commission and popular anger at the brazenness of Karunanidhi in carving up the state among his progeny – and his progeny’s progeny - finding a vent, it was an ideal situation for Jayalalithaa to step into. And step in she did intelligently by outdoing the DMK in giving away freebies. To Karunanidhi’s laptop for every SC/ST student she added 4 gm of gold, free houses for three lakh BPL families and Rs 1 lakh housing assistance to 40 lakh middle income group families, etc. As everybody knows, the administration of Tamil Nadu is almost on auto-pilot. In spite of the poor quality of the political leadership as evidenced during the alternating regimes of Jaya and Karuna, the state is still one of the best administered in the country. Its health care and PDS systems are among the best in the country as are its roads and infrastructure. Jayalalithaa’s own corruption record is nothing to write home about. So more than corruption angering people against the family resulting in its trouncing, it was the other way round: corruption became the trigger to express the anger against Tamil Nadu’s one-family rule. Now, will one-woman rule be any different? The writer is a senior journalist and currently edits Governance Now.