The Invisible Empress of Surrealistan

How Jayalalithaa still rules Tamil Nadu

Rain-smudged posters proclaiming the invincibility of J Jayalalithaa still dot Chennai over a month after she was sentenced to four years in prison by a special court in Bangalore in an 18-year-old, Rs 66.5 crore disproportionate assets case. In many of these exhortations, she is a creature of myth: a blazing phoenix, a Tamil lioness, a peerless white dove, a goddess of revolution. She is anything but a jailbird accused of corruption. Because in the corrosive political tradition of the state, the vast support base of the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), fattened on a diet of ‘Amma’ freebies, will quickly jump ship. But thanks to swift and desperate propaganda by a party on the precipice of power,

Tamil Nadu has slipped into a state of fugue. When I broke the news of Jayalalithaa’s rustication from politics to 36-year-old R Anbarasi over the phone, she went so quiet I thought she had hung up on me. There was a stunned silence, followed by furious denial. Anbarasi is a farm worker and a mother of three from a village in Andipatti, an AIADMK stronghold in southern Tamil Nadu’s Theni district, represented in the 1984 Assembly by party founder and Dravidian icon MG Ramachandran, and later, in 2002 and 2006, by his political heir Jayalalithaa. “But my children and I ate at an Amma Unavagam (canteen) in Madurai just three days ago; we ate five idlis for Rs 5. How can I believe that Amma is gone, that she won’t be Chief Minister for 10 years to come?” a crestfallen Anbarasi asked me. If you only tuned into a certain Tamil news channel or lived someplace where AIADMK workers plastered public walls with poetic e pithets hailing Jayalalithaa as ‘the people’s chief minister’ and a ‘goddess beyond punishment’, you may be forgiven for thinking that nothing has changed in Tamil Nadu.

Indeed, at first glance, not much has. The state’s new Chief Minister, with the ascetic humility of Bharata carrying out Rama’s royal mandate of watching over Ayodhya in his absence, has positioned himself as the instrument of a god he prostrates before. He has even left undisturbed the chamber she occupied as Chief Minister, preferring the anonymity of his old office. O Panneerselvam is an important footnote in Tamil Nadu’s history, a vicar herding Amma’s flock for the second time. “He is a presence by his absence. No photos of him feature in government advertisements. Even his name appears in small print,” says Gnani Sankaran, a Tamil writer, journalist and political commentator. “There is no AIADMK beyond Jayalalithaa. She is their mascot, omnipotent and omnipresent. The party has to keep her brand name alive if it must stay relevant in the 2016 Assembly elections.”

Exile is a terrifying prospect, especially for the officious chieftain of a party hitched to a waning ideology. With the elections 18 months away, can the three-time Chief Minister, toppled at her peak and forced to direct the show from behind the curtains of her Poes Garden residence, pull off an MGR? In the 1967 elections in Tamil Nadu, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) coasted to victory after the matinee idol took a bullet to his left ear. In 1984, an ailing MG Ramachandran on his hospital bed would once again serve as a plank to catapult his party—this time, his 1972 breakaway, the AIADMK—to power. Decades later, his followers are now casting Jayalalithaa’s conviction as a dastardly act of revenge by the opposition and exhorting people to reject this ‘injustice’. “It is a purchased judgment. The party is garnering more support than ever because people believe the charges were foisted on Amma in a case of political vendetta,” says party spokesperson and former minister C Ponnaiyan.

The party head office in Royapettah, Chennai, tells a different story. Resembling an abandoned fortress, with a golden statue of MGR flashing a victory sign from another time, it is a picture of unrelieved gloom. Empty corridors lead to locked doors assigned to district-level office bearers. An Audi and other MUVs are parked in the compound, apparently to ferry any communication to Jayalalithaa’s residence. “Amma is still actively leading the party,” Ponnaiyan claims. But the verdict, which peeled a layer off the myth of her infallibility, lingers in the party’s psyche like a metallic aftertaste. “Following the conviction, though party workers have been going about their routine jobs, they aren’t nearly as enthused as before,” says Ezhil KA Ezhumalai, a longtime AIADMK member who also sells party merchandise—MGR and Amma posters straddling their politico-cinematic lives, party flags and shirts with black and red stripes—from a stall facing the three-storeyed, white building. His business has hit an all-time low. “When Amma was Chief Minister, sales could cross Rs 20,000 in a day. Even when she was opposition leader, there was a healthy demand. Now, I stand to make no more than Rs 1,000,” Ezhumalai says.

An 80s photo of Jayalalithaa swathed in a floral pink sari, and seated on a couch talking into a vintage phone, is displayed prominently at Ezhumalai’s stall, but it is not his best-selling product. Her latest portrait, as a matronly figure in plain blue, represents how far she has come from her first term as Chief Minister between 1991 and 1996, when she was a babe in the political woods, brazenly flaunting her wealth. “Hailed as ‘Puratchi Selvi’—revolutionary maiden—in her early years, Jayalalithaa came to be known as ‘Puratchi Thalaivi’ (leader). Eventually the revolutionary bit fell off and she became simply ‘Amma’. This rise from maidenhood to motherhood was very fast,” says Sadanand Menon, a journalist, cultural commentator and professor.

The first incumbent Chief Minister to be dethroned and disqualified from contesting an election for six years from the end of her prison sentence, Jayalalithaa in absentia still jealously guards her empire, remote-controlling the Tamil Nadu government’s day-to-day workings and policy making. “In her regime, the Cabinet is powerless and only two or three top bureaucrats—notably, former chief secretary and current advisor Sheela Balakrishnan— have access to her,” says a former senior bureaucrat familiar with her ways, requesting anonymity. Given Jayalalithaa’s poor and often whimsical history of clearing files, it usually fell upon Balakrishnan to speed up important clearances, he points out. And now, she may well be the conduit between Panneerselvam and Jayalalithaa, directing the administration and pushing necessary—if unpopular—decisions like the recent milk and liquor price hikes and a 5-per cent Value Added Tax on sugar. “This arrangement can last a few months, but in the eventuality of a largely absent Jayalalithaa, there could be tension,” says the former bureaucrat. For now, though, officers weary of evading Jayalalithaa’s tremendous tentacles and cowering under the quirks of her autocracy will mostly be glad to be able to breathe easy.

The Chief Minister who dubbed the Colonial-era ban on dhotis in Chennai’s social clubs an act of ‘sartorial despotism’ was a despot herself. At quarterly meetings, bureaucrats forced to wear business suits sat sweating in the Chennai heat—or perhaps it was the stress of delivering the perfect power point presentation. In annual reports, Jayalalithaa is said to have consistently ranked most of her bureaucracy as average or below- average. “When she is around, there is a pervasive atmosphere of fear. She insists on impeccable English— one misplaced conjunction is enough to invite the wrath of Jayalalithaa, who takes great pride in her convent education,” the ex-bureaucrat says.

When it came to her people, she metamorphosed into a verisimilar deity, taking MGR’s populist seduction to its pinnacle with Amma canteens, water, rice and laptops. An estimated 250,000-300,000 people—daily-wage labourers, BPL families and the homeless—eat every day at the 294 Amma canteens in Tamil Nadu’s urban centres. “The idea of a benevolent ruler has percolated to the masses and captured the minds and the imagination of the electorate, especially women,” Menon says. “This is why she may be able to pull off another electoral victory.”

If the AIADMK wins the Assembly elections in 2016, it will mark half a century of uninterrupted Dravidian rule in the state, Menon points out. The irony is, the AIADMK chief has long since sacrificed the mantle of Dravidian rationalism and Tamil pride. Unlike the Shiv Sena’s Bal Thackeray, who manipulated the Marathi consciousness from behind the walls of Matoshree, Jayalalithaa cannot prop herself up on the crutch of ideology. “In the past, the sympathy wave generated by MGR’s physical absence from the political arena had an ideological grounding. The message given was the threat to Tamil identity, and the need to secure a Dravidian future. Decades later, it is a different ballgame. Dravidian ideology is on the decline and religious identities are emerging,” Menon says.

Jayalalithaa’s indictment has flung open a window of opportunity for the DMK, which must now redeem itself as a contemporary party while engineering watertight alliances with smaller Dravidian parties like Vaiko’s MDMK. While DMK treasurer and de facto leader MK Stalin is trying to reinvent himself as a young, tech-savvy political icon, he has many crosses to bear: a special court recently framed charges against the party’s former Union Telecom Minister A Raja, DMK MP Kanimozhi, Karunanidhi’s wife Dayalu Ammal, and 16 other individuals and companies in the 2G spectrum allocation scam. It is alleged that the accused accepted a Rs 200-crore ‘bribe’ for granting telecom licences. The string of numbers etched in the electorate’s memory, however, is much longer. It corresponds to the presumptive loss to the Government of Rs 1.76 lakh crore—a grotesque sum even in a country where corruption is endemic. “In the present political scenario, the DMK, despite its problems, cannot be written off,” argues Gnani Sankaran. “As long as Stalin can hold the party together, and stays untainted even if the second line of command is mired in scandal, the DMK can emerge as a plausible alternative to an AIADMK without Jayalalithaa.”

For AIADMK sympathisers, the question really is this: can a party that orbits around its only leader survive her conviction and exile? Or will a new script emerge in the bilateral politics of Tamil Nadu? R Selvam, a 42-year-old cab driver in Chennai who has voted for Amma all his life, says he would rather vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) if it strengthened its position in the state than back the AIADMK’s “dummy Chief Minister”. “O Panneerselvam is a simple and knowledgeable man, a man of many virtues. He doesn’t believe in pomp and he is extremely capable,” says Ponnaiyan. But he has big shoes to fill. “There is a big vacuum,” says writer and political commentator S Murari. “And it represents a golden opportunity for the BJP. BJP sympathisers, who had been voting for Jayalalithaa, could now turn to Modi.”

In April, the national party, a dark horse that had been skulking in the shadows, pitched its tent amid the ruins of the Dravidian movement by appointing Tamilisai Soundararajan, a fiery orator and the daughter of a former state Congress president, to lead it to prominence in the state. “In Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi are mountains. But I believe that a beautiful river like the BJP can flow between them,” says Soundararajan, back home in Saligramam in west Chennai at the end of a long day on the road. “There is a slight change in people’s mindset, especially after the Modi wave. We are now the only corruption-free alternative in the state.”

A doctor by training, Soundararajan is a tenacious campaigner who has her eyes set on thrusting the party into the electoral reckoning in 2016. In the bypolls to local bodies in Tamil Nadu held earlier this year, when most other parties kept away, fearing a sweep by the AIADMK, the BJP went out on a limb and fielded candidates, forcing Jayalalithaa to sit up and take notice. As expected, the ruling party won by a wide margin, but Soundararajan felt validated after a battle well fought. Hope kindled is a dangerous thing. Soon, Tamil magazines were featuring cartoons pitting Amma against Akka (sister), signalling Soundararajan’s arrival in the inhospitable arena of Tamil Nadu politics.

It is not a level playing field, and it may never be. “It is impossible to counter the enduring legacies of MGR and Anna immediately, so the BJP is focusing its energies on attracting the youth and the upper middle class before reaching out to the masses,” says Soundararajan, echoing the Aam Aadmi Party’s suburban pitch in the 2014 General Election. “I am not targeting the blind followers of Jayalalithaa. I speak for the youngsters who expect a TASMAC- and corruption-free Tamil Nadu,” she says.

There is an undeniable wave of support for Jayalalithaa on Twitter, says Suryah SG, a lawyer from Coimbatore who is part of the BJP’s social media team. “Even BJP loyalists have spoken up for her.” To curry favour with this modern breed of voter, the state BJP president is ramping up her online presence. She knows she must strike when the iron is hot. With the sword of 2G hanging over the DMK, the decline in vote shares of the smaller Dravidian parties and the split in the Congress, the AIADMK and the BJP appear poised to ride an advantage. “Because of the Modi wave, people are finally ready to contest elections for the BJP in Tamil Nadu,” Suryah says. “But there is also a sense of disconnect from the national leadership and this must be urgently addressed.”

As party president in a state ostensibly obsessed with and possessed by its Tamil identity, Soundararajan’s role is that of a DJ who must constantly balance the bass and treble of a complex music. But every so often, there is a jarring note in the form of four hours of compulsory Hindi programming on All India Radio or a circular from the Centre asking universities to teach Hindi as a primary language in undergraduate courses. “I am focused on Tamil sentiments. Every time there was an outcry, I responded immediately and requested the national leadership to iron out the creases,” Soundararajan says. The BJP’s pro-Hindi stance may prove to be its Achilles heel, but Soundararajan’s strong suit is Tamil, contained in her very name. Even though the party lost a potential supporter in Rajinikanth, her handling of the Hindi issue has won her the respect of actor Kamal Haasan and lyricist Vairamuthu. She insists they are not political allies. “For now, Modi is the lone star the Tamil Nadu BJP needs,” says Soundararajan.

The other stars in the sky seem to have aligned with Jayalalithaa anyway. Three days after the verdict, the Tamil film fraternity, including reigning actors like Surya, went on a hunger strike, seemingly to express solidarity, and passed a resolution reinstating Jayalalithaa as Chief Minister in the popular imagination. Observers say this ‘protest’ is another of the monarch’s machinations. It wouldn’t be the first time fan clubs are rallied to swing an election in Tamil Nadu. “This is nothing more than a game of chess,” says a distributor who attended the event. “When the queen is in jeopardy, the pawns must do something or prepare to be sacrificed.” The DMK, which reportedly arm-twisted filmmakers into selling TV rights to its media empire for a pittance during its reign, remains unpopular with the industry. “Amma’s rule was kinder. But it was the perceived threat of having its releases stalled that forced the industry to take to the streets in her support,” says the distributor. The hypocrisy of film personalities who had backed Anna Hazare’s campaign for a strong Lokpal Bill only to readily forgive Jayalalithaa her perjury today has gone largely unnoticed.

So is the sympathy wave for Jayalalithaa an elaborate parlour trick? We now know that many who wept in the wrenching tableau flashed on TV after her conviction were performing to a crowd. “I recognised some faces in the crowd. They were junior artistes. I had hired them for my films at Rs 750 a head,” says a noted Tamil litterateur and screenplay writer, pleading anonymity. In Tamil Nadu, you cannot be blamed for walking on eggshells.

Empathy can be a stage-managed farce in a state where exchanging currency notes for votes is shrugged off as a pleasantry. “An estimated six lakh men and women occupy positions of power in the vast AIADMK machinery— councilors, panchayat leaders, district-level party workers—and when they take to the streets, it looks like there is a real sympathy wave,” says A Soundararajan, the CPM MLA from Chennai’s Perambur constituency. “The truth is, public personalities and the middle-class are afraid to speak up against Amma and her henchmen.”

Tamil writer RN Joe D’Cruz isn’t. Ahead of the 2014 General Election, he courted controversy with his Facebook post in support of Narendra Modi and lost out on a publishing contract. Now, he once again throws caution to the wind to peep into the mind of Amma the magician. To understand how Jayalalithaa rules, says D’Cruz, one must first understand the shifting scope of her ambition. “Hers has always been a government by Jayalalithaa, of Jayalalithaa and for Jayalalithaa. It is the last bit that has undergone a shift. ‘For Jayalalithaa’ earlier meant jewellery, saris and footwear. Today, it is her overarching desire to rule the state forever. Even her populist measures and good governance stem from this hunger for power,” he says. “Especially after her prime ministerial aspirations failed to take off, she wants to live and die a queen of Tamil Nadu rather than as Amma.”

There is a reason Jayalalithaa, hidden from public view by the thin veneer of a prison sentence, still commands a formidable army of power-drunk fanatics. She is the only AIADMK leader to have ever had the guts to contest a Lok Sabha election alone. On her 66th birthday, in February 2014, she had sought from her people a very special birthday present: all of Tamil Nadu’s 39 Lok Sabha seats. She won 37. “This is the only verdict that will ever matter to her followers. No court can rob her of the people’s seal of approval,” says K Jayamarimuthu, an AIADMK functionary.

In Tamil Nadu, the more things change, the more they remain the same. By consensus or by authority, Jayalalithaa is an inexorable force impelling the state towards crisis. An eerie calm has now fallen into place, with industry going about its business as usual and the government burying its fears in the mundane realities of administration. Only the occasional tinny noise made by a political wannabe enlivens this surreal space. But the worst is yet to come, says D’Cruz. A fallen Icarus, Amma could bring the sky crashing down with her. “When a ruler as self-obsessed as Jayalalithaa no longer has a vested interest in running a welfare state—she won’t allow Panneerselvam to best her record—it is a worrying turn of affairs,” says D’Cruz.

You could worry. Or you could simply bite into a soft idli and believe in the soft power of Amma.

governanceJ JayalalithaaO PanneerselvamTamil Nadu