Polls 2011: This time Jaya can send DMK into oblivion, permanently

Before moving to Mumbai and joining DNA this writer spent four years in Chennai, which now has a new chief minister in J Jayalalithaa. During my time there I met her on a few occasions. I did not meet her bete noire M Karunanidhi. He was so cut up with my weekly criticism that in an editorial in the DMK mouthpiece Murasoli he derided me as a “James Bond editor”; so Mr Kalaignar (which means “great artist”) would only meet my boss, the proprietor of The New Indian Express. I did meet his younger son and deputy CM, MK Stalin, who avoided looking people in the eye; and I once had coffee with his soon-to-be-sent-to-a-north-Indian-jail daughter Kanimozhi, who did the same thing she does with all repressed senior male journalists in Chennai: twirling her locks and her earrings, batting her eyelids, smiling elusively like the Mona Lisa. Yes, Indian politics produces colourful characters.

Perhaps Jayalalithaa, being out of power, had little to lose meeting me.

The first striking thing about visiting “Amma” is what a grand and lavish home it is she lives in. It’s set deep inside Poes Garden, a most exclusive area of south Chennai; Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi bought a flat there four years ago for around Rs seven crore, mind-boggling even now by Chennai standards. And when you step across the threshold, you enter central air-conditioning heaven (truly a godsend when you consider that Chennai’s weather is hotter than Silk Smitha). The doors to each room are wide, heavy, perhaps of sandalwood, carved ornately and intricately. It is an immediate reminder of those stories of corruption from her first stint as CM in the 1990s (the DMK in the last five years tried hard but was unable to dig out a single case from her 2001-2006 stint).

In the visitors’ room hangs a large black-and-white portrait of a five-year-old girl with an endearing smile, a photo that got Jayalalithaa her first modelling job. It makes you forget the corruption or arrogance usually associated with her. She was obviously thrown into the snake-pit of earning a living early on in life. Veteran journalists take it for granted that she had to endure what every woman in every film industry in the world has to endure; what they prefer to gossip about are the filthy things the late GK Moopanar (who broke off from the Congress in 1996 due to its alliance with Jayalalithaa, and nearly headed the United Front government as India’s first Tamil prime minister) said of her during his drinking bouts.

Jayalalithaa herself is fun to sit with. For a while she is polite and proper, speaking in full sentences. Once she gets going, though, the gossip flows fast and thick, though some of it seemed a bit extreme. Then again, if someone had told me in 2007 that a Union minister, who is treated by the DMK’s first family like a retainer, would deprive the exchequer of a revenue of Rs17,60,00,00,00,000, I would have told him to go and seek counselling. She gives good tip-offs, always the case with politicians even when they’re out of power, for their networks remain intact. The funny thing about Jaya, however, is how often she mentions her own disinclination for politics. “I’m in politics totally by accident,” she’s claimed, saying she would rather spend her time reading and watching TV (it’s said she likes cartoons).

Once I made the mistake of smiling and declaring, “Ma’am, how can you say that? You live, breathe and sleep politics! You are a political animal,” and she threw me a sharp look.

Another time she chided me was when she was quoted from one of our chats saying that BJP leader LK Advani was a spent force (or something to that effect). She called me up and sternly told me to carry a retraction. It’s pretty amazing how politicians are able to make assessments whether in the near-future or in the long-term, even if it goes against conventional wisdom — and they are always proved right. They don’t need our punditry.

As Jaya begins her third term in office, this column will nonetheless engage in a bit of punditry. She can completely finish the DMK, for though it is already imploding from its family feuds it still has the heft and cash of Sun TV’s Kalanithi Maran. All that is needed for her electoral ally Vijaykanth, the B-centre Kollywood matinee idol (who has no neck), to become the Leader of Opposition instead of joining government (his party got more seats than the DMK, so he can take on this role). In India, politics revolves around two poles; most polls are anti-voting exercises. In TN power has alternated between DMK and AIADMK (and in Andhra Pradesh, Jagan Mohan Reddy is the new alternative to the Congress, which is bad news for ex-CM Chandrababu Naidu). If Vijaykanth replaces Karunanidhi as the other pole of Tamil politics, then the DMK will go the way that the state Congress did post-Kamaraj: into the dustbin of history.

And for a much vilified Jayalalithaa, that would perhaps bring a satisfaction deeper than the attainment of power itself.

— The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai