TN needs a creative political script
The change of personnel isn’t hurting Dravidian politics. It has been desiccated by social changes
Dravidian politics today is threadbare, not because it has not succeeded but because it has succeeded too well. It produced decades of epic politics with charismatic figures such as Periyar EV Ramasamy, Annadurai, MG Ramachandran and M Karunanidhi. All these men encompassed the vision of the age and were larger-than-life politicians.
They gave Dravidian politics a new discourse, which created a new vision of society. Sadly, the age of charismatic leaders is over, today what we have are epigones who are barely pygmies. Stalin, despite his name, and Azhagiri hardly seem like political leaders. They have been deputies for so long that they carry the rank of secondariness. Vaiko and Vijayakanth can play cameo performances but can hardly carry a party.
Yet it is not the change of personnel that hurts Dravidian politics. It has been desiccated by social changes. First, the Dravidian movement has lost its poetics, the camaraderie of equality and the innovative blending of film and politics. Today Dravidian pol- itics has become a collection of bad scripts with bumbling actors. The current lot of AIADMK-DMK politicians maintain what one critic has called a Snafu situation. Snafu in World War II was a term for a situation where the present was sustained with futile investments. The acronym was ironic, it meant situation normal, but all fouled up. POST-DMK politics in Tamil Nadu is all snafu.
Two other leadership styles have sought to fill the vacuum. Two great actors with bad scripts and a narrower view of politics: Rajinikanth and Kamal Hassan. Neither can sustain a full-blooded political script in terms of ideology or vision. Rajinikanth has already played the bumbler in the aftermath of the Thoothukudi firings and Kamal Hassan is struggling with the tiredness of a left or liberal script. One watches them as spectacles but realises neither can convert the currency and charisma of cinema into the pragmatic power of politics. After MGR or Karunanidhi, they look like boy scouts stumbling over their lines.
Yet, even if Dravidian politics has lost its chutzpah, Tamil Nadu is bubbling with the effervescence of new issues. The new generation has showed that culture and the North-south divide are still critical issues. The protestors, despite party sympathy from the likes of Stalin and others, were keen to differentiate their brand from the established lot. But more than language or popular culture, what haunts Tamil Nadu is the politics of environment.
Environment has become a site for the renewal of civil society. The debate on livelihood and the future of the coastline has become an acute problem. Second, a rabid sense of communalism is being used as a cover up. Christians are being targeted as the church rises to back the fishing community.
The pollution at Ennore creek and at Kodaikanal, where a major corporation practised environmental racism were the other flash points. The groups responding to these issues are quilt-patch associations from civil society. The environment and its criti- cal links to livelihood have not yet found a place in the Dravidian emancipation.
Even more critical than all these issues is the slow and lethal decline of democracy in the state. State violence has become a way of life in Tamil Nadu.
The most devastating recent expression of this was the Thoothukudi firings where, to quote a former inspector general of police, “a most cynical use of Section 144 was made”. The firings, as the Peoples Watch report has so painstakingly chronicled, were sheer acts of State-sponsored excess. Praising the cops might add to their Rambolike image, but it destroys their accountability. The alleged use of the government departments of environment and law and order by Sterlite displays how low Tamil Nadu politics has sunk.
Agriculture and water are issues that need political articulation in Tamil Nadu. There was a banality of politics as farmers protested against the droughts. There has been a generational change in the political issues confronting Dravidian politics. The dream of equality needs to be balanced by guarantees of diversity and freedom and demands new forms of institutional building.
There has to be an effervescence around these issues. Politics is changing and if Dravidian politics has to survive beyond kneejerk support, it needs to reinvent itself in the post-karunanidhi era. Even culture and films have to create new myths for a Dravidian politics to invent a new generation of creative democracy.