HOW DID TAMIL NADU’S CHIEF MINISTER DIE?
▶ Conspiracy theories abound after charismatic leader’s mysterious death
Among the mysteries around the death of J Jayalalithaa, former chief minister of Tamil Nadu, is this: did she die in September last year, on December 5, or on any date in between?
Jayalalithaa’s death was announced on December 5 after nearly 75 days in a Chennai hospital, where she battled septicaemia. But this official version is coming under question as government ministers hint at political intrigue, conspiracies and even foul play.
On Monday the Tamil Nadu government, still run by Jayalalithaa’s party, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam – announced an inquest into her death. A retired high court judge, A Arumughaswamy, will lead the investigation and submit a report in three months.
The opposition Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party has also called for an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation.
“The different statements issued by ministers have exposed that there is a big mystery,” said M K Stalin, the acting president of the opposition party.
The appointment of Mr Arumughaswamy’s commission came as claims and counter-claims from Tamil Nadu ministers and other ruling party members flew thick and fast.
Perhaps the most dramatic came from Dindigul Sreenivasan, the state’s minister for forests, who contradicted the story that Jayalalithaa had been receiving visitors during most of her stay in hospital, and that she only took a turn for the worse in early December.
“We’ve lied that she ate idlis [a steamed rice dish] and that people met her in hospital,” Mr Sreenivasan said at a party meeting last week. “The truth is that nobody saw her. We were forced to lie.”
Two other ministers have said the same.
Mr Sreenivasan blamed VK Sasikala, Jayalalithaa’s longtime companion, for blocking all access to the ailing chief minister while she was in hospital and for fabricating the details of her death.
After Jayalalithaa died, Ms Sasikala briefly assumed the leadership of her party until the supreme court convicted her of corruption in February.
She is now serving a four-year prison sentence in Bengaluru.
But Ms Sasikala’s family still retains a measure of power. As splits in the party developed after Jayalalithaa’s death, Ms Sasikala’s nephew, TTV Dhinakaran, gained the leadership of one faction.
On Monday, Mr Dhinakaran dismissed Mr Sreenivasan’s claims, saying that his aunt had taken video footage of Jayalalithaa during her stay in hospital but had not made it public out of a sense of decorum. Jayalalithaa was wearing a loose nightgown in the video, he said, and she had always hated to be seen in such informal attire.
“If we release the video now there will be a debate on its authenticity,” Mr Dhinakaran said. “But we’re ready to release it to any appropriate inquiry. We don’t have any fear.”
These contradictory claims over Jayalalithaa’s death build on rumours that have existed for months. In February, a party leader named PH Pandian claimed that the chief minister had been murdered, and that the long stay in hospital was designed to cover up the killing.
The hospital’s authorities collaborated in this lie, Mr Pandian alleged.
Last October, when Jayalalithaa was still the leader of her party, she approved a by-election affidavit with her thumb print, not her signature.
“The signatory has undergone tracheostomy recently and has an inflamed right hand, so she is temporarily unable to affix her signature,” an accompanying doctor’s note testified at the time.
“Hence she has affixed her left thumb impression on her own in my presence.”
But pieces of evidence surrounding Jayalalithaa’s illness or death do not fit with the conspiracy theories floated by the ministers, said Peer Mohamed, who runs Ippodhu, a website that covers Tamil politics.
In March, the government released the late chief minister’s hospital discharge summary and medical reports by a visiting team of doctors from New Delhi. The reports run to more than 50 pages, Mr Mohamed said, and they were consistent with the official story.
He said the ministers were creating this confusion as a distraction from the government’s failures and the factional chaos within the ruling party.
Mr Mohamed pointed, in particular, to the suicide of S Anitha, an aspiring medical student in Tamil Nadu, on September 1. Anitha had fared well in the state’s own school-leaving examinations but poorly in the pan-Indian entrance tests for medical students.
Her suicide enraged Tamil Nadu, which has long held that the national entrance tests discriminate against states that follow their own educational syllabuses and teaching methods.
“If Jayalalithaa was alive, she would have got Tamil Nadu exempted from these national tests, as the federal government had earlier promised,” Mr Mohamed said.
“But the state government is now a weak one. It doesn’t have any sort of power or ability to bargain, as Jayalalithaa had.”
“This is why they’re whipping up an issue that is, in my view, closed and settled. The political class is always very good at this.”
We’ve lied that she ate idlis [a steamed rice dish] and that people met her in hospital. The truth is that nobody saw her DINDIGUL SREENIVASAN Tamil Nadu state minister