Amma knows best

PURATCHI THALAIVI J. Jayalalitha’s path to power has been strewn with innumerable costume changes. Take your pick. Glamour Girl of Tamil Nadu politics, whose political birth from the innards of a peacock float was assisted by MGR playing midwife. Professional Politician, the articulate spokesperson of MGR’s AIADMK, conquering the Rajya Sabha and propagandising MGR-ism. Wronged Woman, taunted as papathi, or Brahmin woman, roughly pushed out of funeral gun carriages, molested on the floor of the Assembly. Arrogant Supremo, the towering cut-out of power, with flashing diamonds in her ears and a Superwoman cape, conjuring up extravaganzas and issuing full page ads of her great public acts, cocking a snook at Central leaders and expelling party colleagues without explanations.

The Persecuted and Prosecuted Persona, struggling under a welter of corruption cases filed against her by a heartless DMK dispensation, incarcerated for a month in Madras Central Jail, sleeping on its hard rat-infested floors and having to stomach the grit in its idlis like a common criminal.

Finally, there is the role of Mother Incarnate, Amma of Arkonam, guardian of Tamil Nadu, and its poorest of the poor. The jewellery has been discarded as has been the cape, the sari modestly drapes both shoulders, a kindly face perfectly composed mirrors nothing but gentle love, head swaying gently from side to side in total approval of popular veneration. There are a few greying strands just to remind people that the glamour girl of yore has dissolved, disappeared forever under this new gravitas. Once in a way, the index finger and the forefinger signal both victory and the Two Leaves, prized emblem of the MGR past. And always, there is ‘sister’ Sashikala, whose constant presence symbolises a pure, mysterious male-free domestic world, shut away behind tall walls and Buckingham Palace gates.

This may be sheer vaudeville for some, but Jayalalitha is too much of a successful actress not to recognise the role of a lifetime when she sees one. Rewind those campaign tapes again and watch the Mother Act scripted to perfection. The festive air on the streets as the Tempo Traveller with its long-tailed convoy halts for a few moments. The fact that Amma generally doesn’t step out hardly matters, you can see her through the windscreen with that smile of benevolence playing on her lips, her eyes full of compassion. She knows your plight, the long wait for water, the kerosene disappearing from the shop, the price of feeding a family, the drunken sordidness of your lives. That’s why she has driven all the way from Chennai to share your squalour. She wants to bless you and your children, so do not suffer little babies from coming unto her. Who knows, sometimes she may even roll down the window, pick the little one, kiss her and name her Rajalakshmi. You want to look on her smooth-skinned, fair-complexioned countenance forever, you want to touch her garments and scream Puratchi Thalaivi vaazhga — long live the revolutionary leader — until your throat runs dry.

Many have commended Jayalalitha for her careful electoral arithmetic in stitching the Vanniyar party of the PMK to her grand alliance with the TMC, Congress and the Left. But she has always made MGR’s constituencies — largely female, largely rural, largely poor — her own. One of her first acts when she came to power as chief minister exactly a decade ago was to wind up the cheap liquor scheme of the DMK regime. The shutting down of the saryakkadais cost the exchequer Rs 320 crore in excise losses but drove women ecstatic. Her struggle for Cauvery water was again something that appealed to all three constituencies, from the farmers of the Cauvery delta to the Coimbatore slum-dweller.

When she moved her bed roll to the MGR samadhi on Marina Beach in July 1993 and went on an indefinite fast, declaring her willingness to sacrifice her life to secure water for her people, she once again captured the popular imagination. Apart from all this, there were constant and well-publicised attempts to control the rise of food prices. Within six months of coming to power, she vowed to make an extra kilo of the cheapest edible oil, palmolein, available to the poor for Deepavali. This she did through the unconventional route of getting central clearance for directly importing palm oil through an NRI.

Such shotgun arrangements led, not entirely surprisingly, to some of the worst abuses of established norms, giving a tremendous fillip to an almost quotidian corruption. Many of these acts of ‘‘Amma’s kindness’’, whether it was the distribution of colour TV sets or saris/dhotis to the poor, led in time to that formidable chain of offences that M. Karunanidhi successfully hitched on to the Jaya bandwagon. The fact is, given the lack of a coherent programme or the ballast of a party ideology, the five years of Jayalalitha’s governance quickly degenerated into the symbolic rather than the substantive. They saw little lasting transformation in the lives of the people who had voted her in. The DMK’s liquor mafia was soon replaced by the AIADMK variation, as bars selling Indian Made Foreign Liquor sprouted all over the state. Despite the chief minister flying to Hyderabad to ensure that Krishna waters would flow into the state, parched fields and long water lines continued to be everyday reality.

Soon, even the breathtaking extravaganzas she presided over, ranging from the ludicrous — 46 grown men rolling on the road to Poes Garden to celebrate the Thalaivi’s 46th birthday — to the faux regal ostentation that had marked the wedding of an adopted son, failed to excite. The humiliating defeat of 1996, when the Thalaivi was packed off like one of those suitcases that the Enforcement Directorate had confiscated from her home, reflected statewide disenchantment.

Yet, through it all, the one image that remained relatively intact was that of the Mother Incarnate, the indulgent mother of a vast, corrupt, patronage network. Five years of Karunanidhi’s DMK rule may have brought flyovers and foreign investment, but somehow the poor obviously didn’t feel they had a stake in it. In the wilderness, Persecuted Amma began to take on an effulgence yet again, as free saris and cheap rice became an aching memory. ‘Mother, with all your faults you are still our mother’, was the message sent out in the 1998 Lok Sabha elections. The recent assembly election continued to express that mood but much more emphatically. ‘Mother of Poes Gardens, all is forgiven. Make us your children once again’.

‘‘Everybody wrote me off,’’ said Jayalalitha triumphantly at the end of the Tempo Travelling. Everybody, but Jayalalitha herself, the Triumphant Mother. ‘‘The voters of Tamil Nadu regard me as their amma. I will try and be a good mother to them,’’ she said. So the wheel has come full circle, as history prepares itself for a repeat performance.

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