Reported By:
| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: May 23, 2016, 08:58 AM IST
The mandate won by Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa for another five-year-term proves yet again that like caste and religious vote banks, a gender constituency also exists. First there were the Amma canteens which have offered a reprieve to working-class women in terms of time spent in kitchens. Jayalalithaa followed this up with baby-care kits for pregnant women and new mothers. Then came the promise to ring in prohibition. In Tamil Nadu (TN), the practise of public drinking in the vicinity of the state-run TASMAC liquor outlets had turned out to be a major law and order menace. Women’s groups have been protesting for long against this. The 2016 party manifesto went further by offering women 50 per cent subsidy on scooters and mopeds, nine-month maternity leave, generous maternity assistance, and gold jewellery. The DMK’s answer to the raft of freebies announced by the AIADMK was to promise its own set of freebies even as its leader MK Stalin criticised Jayalalithaa for robbing citizens of their incentive to work hard and do better in life by pampering them with free gifts.
In hindsight, Stalin will rue the DMK’s generosity in offering 58 seats to allies who just did not have adequate electoral heft. The DMK won 89 of the 176 seats it contested but its allies, the Congress, MMK and IUML could win just nine seats. The Congress strike rate was a poor 20 per cent; it could win just eight of the 41 seats allotted to it. It is unlikely that the Congress will find an ally among the two main Dravidian parties again. Equally surprising is the decline of the BJP after its impressive performance in 2014. With Christian and Muslim community groups overtly pitching their lot with the DMK in the elections, AIADMK could drift closer to the BJP. The abject failure of the third front and the NDA has also reiterated the bipolar nature of Tamil Nadu politics. Vijayakanth’s DMDK and the Vanniyar-dominated PMK will regret the decision to have no truck with the two major parties.
Nevertheless, Stalin can take credit for galvanising the DMK organisation and bringing it back into reckoning. For the DMK, questions about the future of the party after M Karunanidhi have been emphatically answered. Stalin has led from the front, undergoing an image makeover, in which he traded the white shirt and veshti for western formal clothing, and made a determined effort to mix with the masses. It was no more an uncommon sight to see Stalin — who was seen as being entrenched in DMK’s Chennai stronghold — travel on two-wheelers and fishing boats, take selfies with youngsters, and address small wayside public rallies. Beyond superficiality, for a state which venerates its political idols, Stalin did not hesitate to apologise for past mistakes, something that had worked to Arvind Kejriwal’s advantage in the Delhi elections. In the process, Stalin raised questions about Jayalalithaa’s inaccessibility and governance failures.
That none of this helped propel DMK past the halfway mark is a tribute to the image Jayalalithaa enjoys as a generous benefactor. That she was able to solve the electricity woes of the textile sector helped her in western TN.
There were fears that the immense damage sustained by Chennai and north TN in last year’s floods would turn the tide against her. Voters in these areas did register their discontent but it was not enough to oust her. It also needs to be ascertained how the recent phenomenon of bribing voters with surreptitious gifts in cash and kind have played out. That polls were postponed in two constituencies because of such practises implicates TN’s two leading parties. With both parties and voters sacrificing ethics, self-respect politics has been replaced with lavish political patronage as the primary ideology of the Dravidian parties.
