THE GREAT POLL OPERA
It’s Tamil Nadu’s first assembly election without its towering leaders. But the contest is still very much between the Dravidian heavyweights DMK and AIADMK. The national parties are likely to be bit players
Even without their star mascots, the battle between the major Dravidian parties promises to be a potboiler
SHORTLY AFTER DAYBREAK ON FEBRUARY 9, Vivekananda Krishnaveni Sasikala, released after four years in a Bengaluru jail on charges of corruption, returned to Chennai to a grand welcome by supporters as well as some of the ruling AIADMK (All-India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) leaders. At several places en route, well-wishers greeted the 66-yearold leader with firecrackers and flowers (one reason why the usual six-hour journey took almost a day). She also stopped at a few temples on the way. At one point, she was offered a garland so heavy that it took a crane to bring it to her side. The breakaway AIADMK faction, the Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK), and her loyalists within the main party, put on the show. “The party (AIADMK) faced several struggles in the past, too, but has still risen like a phoenix. Amma (the late J. Jayalalithaa) told us how to run the AIADMK for another 100 years after her, and continuing her legacy, I’ll live the rest of my life for the development of the party. The party is family and the family is party…all the children of Jayalalithaa are my children too,” Sasikala told supporters, projecting herself as the heir to Jayalalithaa in the run-up to the assembly election in Tamil Nadu in April-May.
The ruling AIADMK has reason to be worried. Its vote share has been on the decline in every election since 2011, hitting rock bottom at 18.7 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha election (see The Poll Trend). Then, there’s the anti-incumbency from being 10 years in power. In a swift reprisal, therefore, the AIADMK expelled party members who had facilitated Sasikala’s return-from-jail welcome convoy, sending a clear signal that ‘Chinnamma’ (mother’s sister), as allies still call her reverentially, remains an outcast.
The Sasikala sideshow in the past few days had taken the attention away from the upcoming battle between the AIADMK and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the first without its iconic leaders J. Jayalalithaa and M. Karunanidhi. The two big parties of Dravidian politics had long depended on these larger-than-life figures, worshipped by the rank and file. This time, the DMK is projecting M.K. Stalin, Karunanidhi’s son, as its chief ministerial candidate while the AIADMK too is pitching the incumbent E.K. Palaniswami (EPS) as its chief ministerial candidate.
THE ANTI-INCUMBENCY CHALLENGE
Chief Minister Palaniswami faces a particularly stiff challenge, for the AIADMK is trying to win a third successive term. He, too, is invoking the Jayalalithaa legacy, which has the greatest resonance, while also putting out his record in attracting investments and in governance—including a slew of welfare measures, notably the “Amma of all loan waivers” for farmers. Announced on February 5, it seeks to write off Rs 12,110 crore worth of farm loans and benefit 1.64 million farmers. It’s a continuation of the dole politics Dravidian parties have followed since their early days in the 1960s, beginning with the rice for ‘One Rupee per Madras Measure (slightly less than a kg)’ scheme announced by the first DMK chief minister C.N. Annadurai. “I am a farmer. I waived the outstanding crop loans only because I intended to remove all challenges facing farmers,” says CM Palaniswami.
The collective impact of the sops, though, has been that Tamil Nadu has moved from being a revenue-surplus state to a revenuedeficit one between 2012 and 2019. On the positive side, as the 15th Finance Commission report noted in 2020, the state has been a frontrunner in many metrics in sustainable development goals like poverty reduction, good health and well-being and quality education.
Latching on to the development pitch, EPS has been travelling extensively since the early Covid-19 days, proclaiming that the state was ahead of others in implementing containment measures during the lockdown (except in the large Koyambedu market in Chennai, which turned out to be a super-spreader). At his rallies, he has em
Palaniswami showed tact in burying the hatchet with O. Panneerselvam, getting the breakaway faction back and forestalling a disintegration of the AIADMK
phasised how the AIADMK, “following in the footsteps of Amma”, strives for people’s welfare and has drawn investors and created job opportunities. Of course, Amma still remains central to all plans and hence EPS has been unveiling memorials and statues of Jayalalithaa all over the state.
The political trajectory of EPS, barely a year younger than Stalin, in Tamil Nadu politics is neither as rich nor as long as that of the DMK chief. A farmer by profession, he joined the AIADMK in the 1980s, and threw his weight behind Jayalalithaa when the party split after the death of founder M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) in 1987. Inside the AIADMK, he is perceived as a doer, and in the state administration as a pragmatic, down-to-earth politician. This has contributed to his smooth transition into the role of chief minister. But after the developments of 2017, people are also a bit wary of him. The manner in which he won the confidence of Sasikala, who was calling the shots after Jayalalithaa’s untimely demise, or the way he turned on her after she’d handpicked him for the top job ,is all now part of the party’s anecdotal history.
But, then, there’s also the tact he showed in burying the hatchet with his immediate predecessor O. Panneerselvam, and the way he got the breakaway faction led by OPS back into the AIADMK, forestalling the anticipated disintegration of the AIADMK after Jayalalithaa. All this while also steering the government and never losing sight
In a swift reprisal, the AIADMK expelled partymen who facilitated Sasikala’s welcome convoy, sending a clear signal that ‘Chinnamma’ was still an outcast
of governance goals. EPS may have started off as the lesser-known leader, but he built on his accidental accession with canny opportunism and is now a familiar face through his travels and publicity blitz.
DRAVIDIAN BASTIONS
But 10 years in power do take a toll and DMK chief Stalin is hoping to capitalise on this. He has run a spirited and nuanced campaign since March last year. The 67-year-old has been around since the early 1970s, has been the mayor of Chennai and deputy chief minister under his father and, as party president, is the undisputed leader of the DMK.
Ahead of the previous assembly election in 2016,Stalin went on the ‘Namakku Naame (By us, for us)’ roadshow, travelling 1,100 km over five months to take stock of conditions of the ground realities across the state. The tour helped present
Stalin as a mass leader, but the DMK alliance still ended up losing the 2016 election narrowly (by a mere one percentage point vote share, 39.8 to 40.9 per cent) to the AIADMK. The AIADMK got a second term with 136 seats in the 234-seat house, the DMK got 89 but was let down by allies, including the Congress, which managed just eight seats.
For the 2021 election, Stalin has been banking on a lot more than roadshows. In February 2020, despite the scepticism of DMK veterans, he hired Prashant Kishor’s Indian Political Action Committee (I-PAC) to devise novel strategies to mobilise support after Covid-19 made physical campaign tours of rural Tamil Nadu impossible. In its initial days, Stalin, through the ‘Ondrinaivom Vaa (Power of togetherness)’ campaign, reached out to migrant workers, daily wagers and the homeless, whose lives had been crippled by the lockdown. Anyone in need of a service could call a Stalin helpline number and a party volunteer would shoe up to address those needs.
Alongside, the DMK also launched ‘Ellorum Nammudan (All Are with Us)’, an online membership drive through which over two million people have registered as members of the party. Stalin says the drive was to bring together like-minded people to tackle issues pertaining to education and access to healthcare. With this, the party has streamlined the process of the district secretaries connecting and discussing issues with the leader. This twoway communication is not just with party appointees and members, but also with other supporters and well-wishers.
Later, under ‘Vidiyum Vaa (The Dawn Will Come)’, the DMK identified individuals who had worked for the
development of Tamil society and sent out personal appreciation letters, signed by Stalin. He has also unveiled a Stalin ANI app to help ordinary people connect with party leaders online as well as to share party news and events.
By November, the DMK chief was holding a series of ‘Tamilagam Meetpom (Retrieve Tamil Nadu)’ virtual party meetings with over 10,000 select party activists to step up the poll propaganda. “Our goal is Mission 200 (assembly seats). We need just 117 seats to form the government but that will not make us proud. We can’t settle for anything less than 200 seats,” Stalin said, addressing party activists from all 234 constituencies.
To enhance the party’s public image, ‘Nallor Koodam (All of Us)’, a proactive relief mechanism to connect those in need roped in local kitchens to deliver food to the poor in different areas. The party has leveraged this to create close-knit neighbourhood WhatsApp groups to resolve challenges. More than a million households across the state are linked through this network.
CHALLENGES GALORE
There’s no denying that this election is poised for a keen battle between the DMK and AIADMK. The DMK sweep in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, when it won 38 of the total 39 seats, and later the local body polls, where the AIADMK made a comeback of sorts but still ended up second-best (214-plus district panchayat wards to the 243-plus for the DMK) makes for a heady contest now. The two parties also face common challenges, the biggest of which is handling allies. Both the Congress and the BJP have, over the years, tried to offset their diminishing clout in the state by flaunting their influence in Delhi. But they still have not made any major dent in the Dravidian bastions. Both will try to get a larger number of seats for themselves, but the DMK and AIADMK also have a string of minor allies to be kept in line and accommodated. It hasn’t helped their cause that neither the BJP (less than 3 per cent) nor the Congress (less than 10 per cent) has managed a decent vote share in the past two assembly elections. In recent months, the BJP has flexed its muscles in an attempt to expand its influence in the state, but hasn’t seen much success. “From a political perspective, the Dravidian polity has outsmarted the Hindutva leadership. The latter’s hopes of upstaging the DMK and the AIADMK by, first, projecting Rajinikanth as a third alternative, and then by promoting the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) as a politico-electoral entity has not quite panned out the way they had hoped,” says political commentator N. Sathiya Moorthy.
Indeed, for the BJP, it has been a case of elaborate plans gone all wrong in 2020, be it the Vel Yatra, where it tried to stoke communal Hindutva sentiments or the propping up of Rajinikanth as a counter to the AIADMK. The latter’s political no-show after keeping everyone on tenterhooks for the most part of last year forced the BJP to get back in line with the AIADMK’s constellation of minion parties.
The domination of the two Dravida majors has in recent decades spawned several smaller parties that are ever ready to strengthen the coalitions, provided their demands are met. Among them, the parties that secured a vote share of one per cent or more, either on their own or by piggybacking on the two big parties, since 2011, are still in negotiations for 2021. Both alliances will need every vote they can get and hence have to take their allies seriously. An analysis of the vote share garnered by various parties since 1989 shows that taken together, the AIADMK and DMK have secured 60 per cent or more in every election. When alliance partners are accounted for, the Dravidian majors and their allies have
secured between 70 and 89 per cent of the vote share.
Among those likely to be in the AIADMK alliance (besides the BJP) are the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) and the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK), who have placed demands that will not be easy to fulfil. The PMK has a transferable, proven 5.5 per cent vote share while the BJP has about 2.9 per cent (2016 assembly poll). The AIADMK does not appear to be too keen to accommodate the DMDK, whose demands have always been far in excess of the popular support they have in terms of votes.
The PMK, a party of the Vanniyars, a dominant OBC group in northern Tamil Nadu, is now demanding an exclusive quota among the Most Backward Classes. As for the DMDK, party treasurer Premalatha Vijayakanth, wife of its ailing founder, the actor Vijayakanth, is demanding 41 seats, the number the AIADMK had conceded in 2011. Back then, the DMDK had won 29 seats to emerge as the secondlargest party, pushing the DMK to third position. But since then, the DMDK, fighting alone, has not won a single seat in any major election.
And what does Sasikala do to this mix? Well, over 25 years, she had evolved as the power behind the throne as Jayalalithaa’s acolyte, and she seems determined to show that she is still a formidable force in Tamil Nadu politics. Sasikala is barred from holding any elected office till 2027, has been expelled from the party and her legal troubles continue, so any move on the party or to regain her assets will have to factor in these challenges. Analysts speculate that she will mark time and wait for the election outcome. If the AIADMK loses, it will be her moment to discredit the current leadership who, incidentally, were her protégés, and call for a change.
Notwithstanding the continuing crackdown on the section of the AIADMK cadre who went to welcome her, posters of Sasikala continue to appear on the walls of Chennai, indicating a clear division in the party over the issue. Some argue that deputy chief minister O. Panneerselvam, who does not see eye to eye with EPS on several issues, may come under pressure to extend tacit support to her, especially if his supporters from among the Thevar community, to which Sasikala also belongs, are not accommodated with party tickets. Her breakaway AMMK is still to announce its plans for the election.
That said, as of now, Sasikala does not seem to have the inclination or the wherewithal to stop the AIADMK leaders from going ahead with their plans for the election. Even if she tries to intervene by mobilising her supporters lurking at various levels within the party organisation (the much hyped ‘Mannargudi mafia’), it would only boomerang on her as the AIADMK could lose its voters and the election.
Meanwhile, what applies for the AIADMK holds good for the DMK too. It will rely on trusted old allies—the Congress, Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), Marulamalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), CPI, CPI(M) and several smaller parties—to ensure a dependable transfer of votes. As individual parties, their vote share, except for major ally Congress, is negligible, especially when compared to their demand for seats. Indeed, some DMK leaders feel they would get the votes of the alliance parties even if the cohorts were to quit over seatsharing squabbles. There are apprehensions about losing the seats given to allies who either do not have winnable candidates or a selfsupporting voter base. The DMK leaders cite the 2016 and 2019 poll results to prove their point.
Which is exactly the source of friction with the Congress,
Some DMK leaders feel the party will get the votes of alliance partners even if they quit over seat-sharing differences. There are worries the allies may not have the necessary pull to win the allotted seats
which is worried about being allotted fewer constituencies than the 40 it got in 2016 (the party won just eight seats with a 6.4 per cent vote share). The seatsharing talks have also been sullied by the DMK making claims on neighbouring Puducherry, where a Congress government is in power. The DMK feels they should be heading the alliance there too, when the state goes to polls in the summer.
THE ONE PER CENT MATRIX
There are several ‘one per cent parties’ (who have no more than a one per cent vote share) who matter as they represent different caste groups. These parties thrive, even though the Dravidian ideology underlines a casteless society. “Caste is definitely a factor and a decisive one in pockets. But it’s only the PMK in the north that has repeatedly proved that it has over five per cent vote share since its founding in 1991,” points out Moorthy.
The Vellalar Gounders dominate politics in the western region and the Thevars, a.k.a. Mukkulathores, in the south of the state. Both are traditional AIADMK strongholds, but occasionally, as in the 1996 election and even later, the two regions have voted out the party on charges of corruption. They did not vote for the AIADMK alliance in the 2019 general election. Only the western region stayed with the AIADMK in 2016 while the DMK and its partners shared the honours in the north and south of the state.
Then, there are the Nadars in the southernmost part of the state, a region the community dominates, and they are divided between the Congress and the BJP. Overall, it depends on individual constituencies and the caste of contestants, especially from the DMK and the AIADMK. There are also instances where castes join hands to run down the dominant one. Here, party identity at times comes to the rescue of the contestant.
Consequently, seldom have nonDravidian fronts managed to get a respectable vote share in the past 50 years (the highest was the Congress with 19.8 per cent in 1989). This is also why a party like the actorturnedpolitician Kamal Haasan’s Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) will be unable to make a significant dent. And with Rajinikanth reluctant to try on the politician’s garb (after raising everyone’s hopes for much of last year), what seems probable is that film stars may fight shy of launching political ventures in the future. As for the 2021 outcome, Prof. Ramu Manivannan, head, department of politics and public administration, Madras University, says, “Prospects for the DMK are 50 plus one (per cent). The thing to watch will be how best the AIADMK and its BJPPMKDMDK alliance counters this to make it a close contest.” Even minus the star cast, it seems there is a promise of excitement.