AIADMK needs to invoke Jaya’s spirit

With barely a year to go for the 2021 Assembly polls in Tamil Nadu, the ruling AIADMK led by Chief Minister, Edappadi K. Palaniswami, seems to be tying itself into knots by letting the intensifying opposition DMKled protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) turn into an irredeemable catch-22 situation.

Understandably, the Treasury benches in Fort St. George have their political compulsions, what with the numerically stronger BJP dispensation in Delhi calling all the shots. But as a popularly elected regime, which Mr. Palaniswami and his Deputy Chief Minister, O. Pannerselvam constantly swear as ‘Ammavin Arasu’, it will hardly lose anything big by taking an assertive stand on the CAA/NPR/NRC issues.

For what is at stake is not just the CAA per se - the official line that existing citizens of India will not be affected by it and so on - as the sustained nationwide resentment to it is part of deeper concerns. The anxieties in the public arena are not just about the Muslim minority being left out of the legislation’s beneficiary ambit by tacitly introducing a religious criterion in conferring Indian citizenship to refugees persecuted elsewhere. It is also about the ruling BJP’s vigorous initiatives to update the

National Population Register (NPR) along with the Census-taking this year, which logically would form the basis for preparing a National Register of Citizens (NRC), as indicated by the Rules itself under the Citizenship Act.

For now, though, Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi had recently said that NRC is not even on the table, but BJP’s 2019 Lok Sabha polls manifesto clearly speaks of moving to a pan-Indian NRC in phases, notwithstanding the NRC’s dismal failure in Assam.

Going by the recent political developments, the DMK and its allies, for sure have had an early bird advantage, and the party president M K Stalin has been assiduously building upon it in making it part of the combined opposition’s core agenda against the AIADMK. Even as the controversy began to unfold, much before its ‘Shaheen Bagh’ phase and the later traumatic violence in Delhi and a few other places, Mr. Stalin’s argument that the AIADMK with 12 MPs’ in the Rajya Sabha then, could have defeated the CAA Bill in the Upper House, but chose to go along with the BJP government, just as they did in the Triple Talaq (Amendment) Bill earlier, struck a diffused chord with the people.

The DMK-led mega opposition rally in Chennai on December 23 and a series of agitations have helped to keep its alliance going, even after cracks in ties with the Congress, closer to the first phase of the rural local bodies’ elections in late December 2019. The DMK then, in a brisk campaign, got over two crore people to sign on a memorandum against CAA/NPR/NRC, which was handed over to the President.

The political fallout of the DMK’s unambiguous anti-CAA/NPR/NRC stance, supervened its opposition to the Jammu and Kashmir developments since August 5, 2019, was clearly there to see in the first phase of the Panchayat elections, when DMK and its allies won over 60 per cent of the wards at all levels.

A poll strategist like Prashant Kishor may have just stated the obvious to Mr. Stalin, but that was an eye-opener to the ruling AIADMK that it cannot ignore minorities’ concerns. In fact, the AIADMK’s former Ramanathapuram MP, Anwar Raja had already sounded the warning bugle, that the party’s approach to issues like ‘instant’ Triple Talaq and the CAA will only further alienate it from the Minorities.

The completion of the rural local bodies’ elections, thanks to ‘indirect elections’ mode for top posts back in saddle, helped the AIADMK to partly recover ground; however, sensing its inadequacy, a politically agile Mr. Palaniswami, to offset the negative impact of its pro-CAA stance, mounted a huge counteroffensive to the DMK in rally-afterrally, by harking back to AIADMK’s development and growth agendas.

Mr. Palaniswami added farmers’ muscle by giving it a rural thrust - a new state-of-the-art veterinary research institute at Talaivaasal, big announcements on new irrigation projects and topped it with a law declaring major parts of Cauvery delta as protected agricultural zone, to ward off further ecological damage to the state’s food bowl from oil and natural gas drilling. He is also pushing for the Utopian Godavari-Cauvery river link.

All these need the Centre’s support. Hence it partly explains the AIADMK’s rejection of the DMKled opposition’s demand for an Assembly resolution against CAA/NPR/NRC, even as Mr. Palaniswami keeps reassuring Minorities to keep the MGRJayalalithaa ‘Two Leaves’ bicolour above saffron.

However, the undoing could be in the expanded criteria in updating NPR, which has now gone up to 21 from the 15 in the 2010 NPR that was basically focused on enumerating the ‘usual residents’ of an area, not about ‘citizenship’.

The NPR saw further updating in 2015, when it was sought to be linked with ‘Aadhar’. Now, NPR2020 seems a more weaponised questionnaire, including mother tongue, and date and place of birth of both father and mother of the household head.

It is there that the real sting of the new NPR comes, as people fear that data could be used to push more into the penumbra of ‘doubtful citizens’, and not just a count about “where you live and what you do”. Prudent politics would demand that AIADMK needs to take an assertive stand, not just pigeonhole them as ‘optional’.