After Jaya’s death, there has been little governance
After the split verdict, Tamil Nadu waits for an honest and peopleoriented government with a clear majority
In delivering a split verdict on a batch of petitions challenging the disqualification of 18 dissident AIADMK MLAs owing allegiance to AMMK leader TTV Dhinakaran, the Madras High Court has given reprieve to the government led by AIADMK’s E Palaniswamy.
He must feel relieved but until a third judge is named and gives a verdict that will amount to a 2:1 order , the people of Tamil Nadu remain without a government in the full and true sense of the term. They are the victims of a political culture that valorises hero-worship, cults and deification.
J Jayalalithaa’s MLAs – 117 of them in the Tamil Nadu Assembly House of 234 – had been trained and conditioned to treat her as precisely that ,a deity. With her gone, in the normal course, ‘her’ MLAs had but to choose another leader and demonstrate their undiluted trust in that person for the governor of the day to swear him or her, into office. But when were they helped, allowed, to do things in the ‘normal course’ ?
Sasikala Natarajan, whose proximity to the late leader was as clear as the nature of that proximity was un-explained had, not so long ago, been thrown out by Jayalalithaa from the house which she shared with her, but then rehabilitated. Emerging from the funeral as the principal claimant to the crown, she managed to attract and repel MLAs. The emergence of TTV Dhinakaran, Sasikala kin and loyalist, through a dramatic by-election victory from Jayalalithaa’s R K Nagar seat in Chennai as an independent candidate, shows what needed no proof : The people of Tamil Nadu voted Amma into office; her MLAs came in her wake. Wherever an AIADMK candidate was fielded, they were proxies for Amma. Not they but Amma was the candidate.
The state has had for the last one year a government with a residual legitimacy but without a voltage of its own. Its government has been whirring even as a ceiling fan does, for a while, after it has been switched off.
The High Court, one hopes, will end the suspense on the petitions soon by either upholding the disqualification or setting it aside. But either way, for the people of Tamil Nadu, the suspense and the misfortune of not having an emphatically mandated government, is likely to continue. Thanks to the manipulations of current-day politics, the 18 members, if not disqualified, may not vote as a solid group against the government, defeating it. And if disqualified, the resultant by-elections may garble the picture even more.
The picture will become clear only in another election, held, hopefully, very soon.
Tamil Nadu faces serious problems. One might call them crises. A study by Athreya Mukundan in Swarajya (October, 2017)