Tamilnadu After Jayalalitha: People, Politics & Proxy Government

Jayalalitha, endearingly known as Amma, was famous for her pro-poor social sector schemes that contributed in making Tamil Nadu a welfare state. She surpassed her mentor, M. G. R. fairly soon, to become a leader in her own right. Her death is certainly is a big blow to the state.  What remains alive is the abounding speculation: After Amma, what? Shastri Ramachandran believes that O. Panneerselvam has been put in the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister’s chair by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As his point man, Union Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu ensured that the Governor, key AIADMK figures and state officials stuck to the script written in Delhi. The credentials and acceptability of Saiskala Natarajan would be put to test in upcoming local body polls.

Rough Transcript

Prabir Purkayastha: Hello and welcome to Newsclick. This program with Real News.

Today we have with us Shastri Ramachandran, a well known journalist who has covered Tamilnadu, China, India and lots of other issues. Shastri we have had a huge outpouring of grief with Jayalalitha’s death. She, undoubtedly was one of the most charismatic figures on the Tamilnadu stage. What explains her popularity and this kind of adulation and grief that we saw?

Shastri: I think the Government at the Centre wanted to create kind of extrapolate this grief that is being borne by all the people all over the country and poor people in UP and Bihar and elsewhere who are standing in line to change their currency notes are least unmoved by what’s going on in Tamilnadu or even in their own states. But this was for the Centre to show that oh we are very much part of the picture . So everybody wanted a stake in her popularity and her popularity which has not disappeared or been buried with her. It is still alive as a political legacy to be cashed in upon.

Prabir: So what explains this popularity?

Shastri: I think MGR was hugely popular. And actually there is also a cardre base. The difference in the vote polled by the DMK and the AIADMK in any election, I think is always less than four or five percent sometimes it is only two to three per cent the difference between the two. Because you have the cardres, and the DK cardres are split down the middle right down to the district from the state level.

Prabir: The DK being the original …

Shastri: Dravida Kazhagam which is the movement that came out of the Justice Party movement of which the DMK and AIADMK are the parliamentary political parties. So it is basically the DK cardre that sustains the DMK and AIADMK. Then you have add-ons to that with the Congress party for a long time accounting for say ten to fifteen percent of the vote which could swing this way or that, and get a majority of Lok sabha seats in return for a smaller portion of assembly seats . Now there is no doubt that MG Ramachandran was popular as a film star. His popularity base was huge, and Jayalalitha was accepted regardless of the fact that she was not from the Justice Party or the Dravida kazhagam movement or part of the Dravida movement in any way. She was accepted as a leader because she was seen as the heir to MGR. And this was tested because you had MGR’s second or I don’t know if Janaki was the third wife. But you had Janaki Ramachandran and Jayalalitha. And Janaki was also Chief Minister for a while and eventually when the chips were down it is Jayalalitha who emerged on top of the situation.

Prabir: Also interesting that Tamil politics has also been governed by Tamil films which is something also not so well known outside Tamilnadu. The close nexus as you said between Tamil films or the kind of films which were there of which MGR or Karunanidhi all of them were part of it in different ways, and the fact that Jayalalitha really inherited the film legacy.

Shastri: Yes, actually the films that MGR had acted in are also a kind of manifesto from which he drew his programs. For instance one of the most popular schemes of MGR was the noon meal scheme which has been hailed by the international organizations like UNICEF and so on because it has increased the level of child nutrition, school attendance and so on. Then they also introduced free meals for the poor in Tamilnadu and Jayalalitha went further and she introduced free meals for Muslims with Biriyani and eggs, and things like that. So you had a large number of welfare measures. So when I speak of films, one of MGR’s earliest films was a film called Anna vitte kai, ‘the hand that feeds”. So the idea of the noon meal scheme was taken from this film Anna vitte Kai. Again if you see MGR’s film Rikshakaran, he is shown as giving away shawls to Riksha people. He is firstly a generous man in terms of giving away things to the poor, compared to other film stars like NTR who rose to political power. So that is based on his film Rikshakaran. So many of the things that he did, he derived from his films and the script writers were largely influenced by the Communist parties, or the Dravida movements and their manifesto and their egalitarian outlook, everything.

Prabir: So it’s an interesting point you are talking about, that both the parties, Jayalalitha definitely, built themselves on welfare. A lot of it was welfare. So it is also interesting that it goes against the current ethos which argues that austerity is what the Government should practice. Welfare is wasteful. But if you see Tamilnadu all the indices, if you see employment, the growth per capita, economically it is among the top states. So the welfare has not caused the kind of impact it’s supposed to do if you take austerity economics into account which actually Gujarat follows. Gujarat is a very interesting counter example; no welfare or much less welfare and supposed to have good indices of development. But if you take all the other figures including malnutrition all these figures Gujarat does very poorly compared to Tamilnadu. Tamilnadu does well on employment as well.

Shastri: Yes. I just want to quickly kind of take the schemes that have been there, because we can trace the kind of reinforcement of Jayalalitha’s popularity based on MGR and AIADMK and the Dravida, what really kind of reinforced it is the slew of schemes she came up with in recent years. For instance, salt. Salt is very essential. You had Amma salt. You had Amma bottled water, you had Amma pharmacies, Amma theatres where tickets would not be more than ten rupees ….

And Amma canteens.

Yes. And I have been to these Amma canteens. It’s really amazing. I don’t know what’s the nutritional value of it, but it definitely leaves your stomach full. May be there aren’t enough vegetables in the sambar or enough daal in the sambar, but you can eat for a full day, three full meals for less than twelve rupees. I don’t think it’s possible anywhere else in the world except in Tamilnadu. Then there are things that are less known. For instance they give one lakh rupees across the counter if anyone has a heart problem and requires a surgery, and this is open to all people inTamilnadu who are poor. All they have to do is to take their ration card and go to the hospital. No hospital turns away a person for surgery because money is required. Then there is a good hospital network unlike Gujarat for instance. A very large percentage of the population is covered by govt. hospitals in Tamilnadu. Today there are large number of private colleges, I think the total number of private medical colleges is thirty nine compared to only eleven government medical colleges. So you have this welfare net which is huge. Education is very good. You have government arms competing with each other. You have not only government schools, government girls’ high schools or boys’ high schools but you also have corporation schools in places like Chennai which produce much better results than many of the private schools.

Prabir: Next issue, after Jayalalita who, of course this has been an old question. Now Sashikala who was her close companion, who had earlier sort of separated from her family to say that she was going to be only part of Jayalalita’s family as it were . Now she is emerging apparently as the heir apparent. But Sashikala’s family seems to have moved back with her. So the old charge against Sashikala that this led to lot of nepotism, a lot of family getting prominence, all that may come back. So how do you look at the succession issue within AIADMK?

Shastri: To the Tamil voters, these are all very remote democratic issues, they are entirely theoretical and abstract. They are not concerned with these things at all. For them it is Amma, after Amma will it be Chinamma for the people in the AIADMK…

Chinnamma being Sasikala

Sasikala. And in the DMK also it is a family enterprise. Now for the time being the AIADMK is also a family enterprise led by Sasikala. But unlike the DMK one does not know how independent or autonomous the AIADMK is. What you have in Tamilnadu is not the government of Sasikala, she might be the one who can press the switch but the one who got the socket and plug is Mr. Narendra Modi in Delhi. This is actually a Modi Sarkar by other means that you have in Tamilnadu right now, where they have kind of manufactured a consensus among various factions of the AIADMK to have a particular person as Chief Minister, and to also allow the power centers below and behind the Chief Minister to function. This is the first stage of the operation which I see as a holding operation while they try to see who are the others who need to be accommodated, what kind of negotiations should take place, who shall be the intermediary. Now Sasikala’s family, it’s a very complex network, not everybody in the family is with her. There are reports that she is estranged from her husband. Her husband is a political entrepreneur in his own right much like Sasikala. And they were to have local body elections in December. Until the local body elections are held, which will not be in December now, one will not know whether Sashikala can hold the operation. As of now, the government of India, they call it stability but the real reason is they would like the AIADMK without getting split, without being broken or anybody chipping away at it, to remain in office at least till August next year till the President and the Vice President are elected because the AIADMK has forty eight members in Parliament.

Rajyasabha and Loksabha put together.

Put together, 11 in the Rajyasabha and 37 in the Loksabha. So this is very important, plus the votes of all the MLAs. These are all very important for the BJP to have their own President when President Pranab Mukherjee retires in July 2017. So this is the prime consideration.

Prabir: Essentially one part is Tamilnadu politics and the other is what is going to happen at the Centre. What you are saying is that right now AIADMK is actually being held together by the Central Government’s need to have votes for the President and therefore the stake that the central government has, the Modi government has in AIADMK to stay united behind probably Sashikala as a figurehead. But in the long term we have to see how the things politically develop.

Shastri: Not a very long time, in a few months, one might see. There might be changes because there will be winners and losers. And this is the kind of necro - politics, I mean necro politics not in the extreme academic sense in which it is but where the politics of the living are based on the death of someone I think this is peculiar to Tamilnadu.

Prabir:Thank you very much for being with us . We will discuss more on this issue with you as things develop, and as you say, next three to six months should see how things develop in Tamilnadu. Thank you very much to be with us. This is all the time we had today for Newsclick. Please keep watching Newsclick for further episodes.