Jayalalitha’s Sangh colours are out

There are no prizes for guessing this one. Tamil Nadu’s opposition party, the AIADMK is getting ready to publicly join hands with the opposition party at the Centre, the BJP, again. Through the last week of September, Miss Jayalalitha, AIADMK supremo, sent the right signals to the BJP, its prospective partner in waiting. First came the reception for BJP leaders at her posh Poes Garden residence and next came her statement that the decision on alliance with the BJP can wait. It is one signal that warmed the BJP members. Last Thursday, the AIADMK rushed to the Supreme Court with a contempt plea against the TN chief minister and DMK members soon after seeking and succeeding in getting a stay order on the bandh call given by the DMK and its allies in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry demanding speedy implementation of the Sethusamudram project. But this was hardly to please the BJP. The action was more intended as an exhibition of animosity towards someone who throughout his political career had managed to oust Brahminism, not Brahmins, from the political sphere. From the little that trickles of her personal life, Miss Jayalalitha’s belief in Ram is indeed debatable. It is still of greater debate whether the AIADMK will gain from an alliance with the BJP in Tamil Nadu, having lost the 2004 election badly in its company. That the BJP is in a political wilderness in terms of its reckoning of national affairs is a moot point for the AIADMK. According to certain quarters, the lady who is now showing off her saffron colours, was born a Christian. But this one is hard to prove now. For political watchers, her desperate countdown to find a national partner has often been mixed in saffron. It was during her first tenure between 1991-1996 that she shocked the state Assembly by asserting her caste identity, something that the state was struggling to weed out. “**Naan pappathi thaan**,” (I am a Brahmin women), she told the Assembly, shocking everyone into caste consciousness. She also astonished everyone again by offering support to the BJP in its Babari Masjid demolition drive. She went on record openly promising supporters for the **kar seva** at Ayodhya. The only time her Sangh colours were wrapped was when she allied with the Congress. For Miss Jayalalitha, the last few years have been a perpetual chase for national prominence. She received it through the 1990s but lost it because of her mercurial nature. Her recent quest for a national partner began soon after her electoral drubbing in the Assembly election which she lost to the DMK-Congress alliance in May 2006. Putting behind her pre-election rhetoric against Congress chief Mrs Sonia Gandhi, calling her a woman with no **pati-bhakti,** Miss Jayalalitha rushed to Delhi and waited for an appointment to meet her. Only when it failed to materialise did she turn her attention to the idea of a third front, banking on support from the Left parties. The Left proved to be unenthusiastic for want of numbers. It was Mr Amar Singh of the Samajwadi Party who kept her in a supposed national reckoning through 2005 and 2006. But the 2007 mission of the Sangh Parivar which turned its attention from the Babari Masjid to the Sethusamudram project, proved to be a boon for Miss Jayalalitha. She surprised everyone by her complete turnaround from her stand in 2004; she had then supported the project and asked for breaking Adams bridge (or Ram Setu). But here she is now opposing the demolition. It was the sour-grapes syndrome playing itself out when the AIADMK spearheaded the short-lived United National Progressive Alliance, which was little else than a statement of its anti-Congress rhetoric. The internal contradictions as well as Miss Jayalalitha’s attitude proved to be its doom. As was to be expected, the UNPA plan to defeat the UPA’s presidential candidate, a Herculean task from the beginning, failed. The AIADMK also earned the mistrust of other UNPA members by choosing to go its own way in the poll taking sides with the BJP rather than abstaining from the election as decided by the UNPA allies, thanks to a visiting BJP leader just ahead of the election. The BJP, however, appears to have hardly learnt anything from it. In fact, senior BJP leaders, from Mr LK Advani to Mr Rajnath Singh, have since held frequent meetings at Amma’s residence. Miss Jayalalitha’s statement supporting the Sangh on the Ram Setu, therefore, comes as no surprise. In Tamil Nadu, AIADMK founder MG Ramachandran’s  dubious double persona, one for the public sphere and one personal, is well recorded. Miss Jayalalitha, the inheritor of the party, too is considered a natural ally of the Sangh elements, even as the party members retain their image of Dravidian ideologues, opposed to the leadership of Mr Karunanidhi for certain reasons. The uncritical support that MGR received, as against Mr Karunanidhi, in the hands of a totally Brahminical Press of Madras in the 1970s and 80s till his death is well documented. Soon after coming to power in the 1970’s MGR, who had an unbroken long reign in Tamil Nadu, was the first to daringly declare that he was a devotee of Goddess Mookambigai, thus turning his earlier projected atheist principles on its head. For the BJP, always looking for Sangh elements in every party, the insult suffered by Miss Jayalalitha’s rejection soon after the 2004 election when she unceremoniously dumped the BJP after losing the general election, is of no consequence. The insult to Kanchi Sankaracharya by his arrest by the AIADMK government in 2004 too is forgotten. That the BJP is clearly inclined to talk to the AIADMK was made clear by the BJP president, Mr Rajnath Singh, who outlined it after the Bhopal meet last month. Consequently, the state unit is desperately waiting as it knows that only a tie-up can keep it alive in the state. The state BJP’s chances had plummeted in the run-up to the May 2006 Assembly election; A friendless BJP was rejected even by the newly formed DMDK, which began its electoral foray only in September 2005. The BJP, which in Tamil Nadu strictly caters to the interests of the less than three per cent Brahmin population in the state, keeping itself in the public consciousness has little to do with mass contact and elections. It is a question of finding enough and appropriate supporters to fill the ranks of the Sangh’s political wing, the BJP. “We believe that if our designs succeed in Tamil Nadu all other states will prove to be a cakewalk,” was a gloating belief openly stated by a BJP leader at the height of the DMK-BJP alliance in Tamil Nadu in 2000. For the BJP’s Brahmins, who blame the DMK for the loss of political power, the hope remains hinged on Tamil Nadu and the removal of the present chief minister, Mr Karunanidhi. Their rejoice, thus, is vivid. The AIADMK’s plea in the Supreme court as well as the request for stay of the bandh on 1 October has clearly brought out the simmering Brahmin Vs non-Brahmin debate in Tamil Nadu. The debate rocked the state critically for four decades before and three decades after independence. The India-Sri Lanka accord and the Sri Lankan fiasco proved to be another debating point on this issue. All these issues are currently fused together politically. Miss Jayalalitha’s stand has pitted her against the DPA allies led by the DMK. The belief is that her Sangh colours are natural. The Ram Setu issue is just another straw that has brought the Dalits, minorities, Leftists and non-Brahmins on a single platform in Tamil Nadu. It is a harder alliance to beat in a state where the Supreme Court’s observation on dismissal of the DMK government is the current raging debate and the anger against the court is rising once again. (The author is a Special Representative of The Statesman based in Bangalore) http://www.thestatesman.net