The Tamil Nadu Election: New political realities replace old
separatist rhetoric
by Rajan Philips

Karunanidhi
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Jayalalitha
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The outcomes of the recent State Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu,
West Bengal, Kerala, Assam and Pondicherry are good news for the
Congress-led UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government in New Delhi.
The winning coalitions in the state elections are all part of the ruling
alliance in Delhi, although in West Bengal and Kerala the main contest
was between parties who also constitute the Delhi alliance.
In West Bengal, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) recorded its
seventh election victory while across the country in Kerala, the CPI(M)
defeated the incumbent Congress State government winning two-thirds of
the Assembly seats. Congress-led coalitions won the elections in
northeast Assam and southeast Pondicherry, while the Congress, the CPI(M)
and the CPI are all part of the Democratic Progressive Alliance (DPA)
led by the DMK that won the election in Tamil Nadu.
CPI(M)'s victories in West Bengal and Kerala will help strengthen
"the role of the left in national politics", according to CPI(M)'s
Secretary Prakash Karat. The CPI(M) gives critical support to the
Manmohan Singh government in Delhi, while taking it to task over
government policies in regard to increasing foreign investment and
privatization and over Delhi's growing closeness to the Bush
administration in the US.
Ironically, the national leadership of the CPI(M) has little say over
the Chinese-styled liberal economic reforms, focused on foreign
investment and privatization, pursued by the Party's popular Chief
Minister Buddhadeb Battacharya in West Bengal.
Only in Tamil Nadu the election led to the ouster of a state
government that was opposed to the central government in Delhi. The All
India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) led by Jayaraman
Jayalalitha, the matinee actress turned political matron, has been in
power since 2001 and is more of an ally of the BJP than the Congress and
its allies. In the 2004 national election she campaigned hard for the
reelection of the BJP government in Delhi, but the latter lost every
central seat in Tamil Nadu to the Congress alliance.
Among the reasons for Jayalalitha's defeat are her opposition to the
government in Delhi and the implementation of central government
programs in Tamil Nadu, her earlier association with the Hindu
fundamentalism of the BJP, the alienation of educational institutions,
and the resentment towards her autocratic and personalized style of
politics, not to mention her passion for shoes like Imelda Marcos.
Her government's inept handling of the scandalous crimes involving
Jayendra Saraswathi, the Shankaracharya of the great 2500 year old
Kanchi Temple, did not go down well with Tamilian elites. Many thought
that her government had grown out of touch with the people and becoming
unapproachable to its constituents.
Rural Poverty in India's Detroit
More substantively, the election brought to the fore the issues of
rural poverty and the state's agrarian crisis. Superficial observers had
fun about the election freebies - quality rice at reduced price, two
eggs a week in school mid-day meals, bicycles for students, television
sets for the poor etc. etc. - offered by the competing parties. But as
Karunanidhi himself noted the offer of rice was not a political
one-upmanship but an admission of the plight of the rural poor.
The last time rice was an election issue was also the first time the
DMK won the State election, in 1967, forming the first non-Congress
government after independence, with its founder leader C. N. Annadurai
as Chief Minister. Forty years later despite Tamil Nadu's achievements
and despite being touted by foreign investors as India's Detroit (the
motorcar city in the US) and one of India's economically successful
states, poverty and landlessness continue to stalk rural Tamil Nadu.
Apart from rice the DPA's manifesto includes a more substantial
response to rural poverty - apparently at the insistence of the two
Communist Parties: 2 acres of land to an estimated 4 million landless
families and the waiver of loan payments after a farmer's death. As his
first act after swearing in, the new Chief Minister, M. Karunanidhi,
signed the administrative authority to implement these measures.
The World Bank and the IMF may see these measures as wasteful
populism but they are in fact a reflection of the market's failure to
serve marginalized populations. They are also a sad commentary on
India's much vaunted Green Revolution and a reminder of the subversion
and failure of land ceiling laws introduced since the 1960s. Apart from
legal loopholes, successive governments have failed to redistribute
surplus (ceiling) lands to the landless.
Adding injury to insult was the outgoing Jayalalitha government's
controversial Wasteland Development Programme that allowed state lands
to be given to Indian and foreign businesses. By the government's own
figures about 4 million acres were divested under the programme
benefiting just 110,000 farmers. This translates to 50% of land that the
new government will have to find for nearly 40 times larger number of
beneficiaries.
But giving land to the landless is hardly sufficient to address the
agrarian crisis. Additional measures like irrigation, credits and
marketing support, skills education of farmers, linkages with small
industries and trade, and avenues for exports have to be promoted or
undertaken by the state. The DPA's manifesto identifies these measures
and the Left parties have indicated that they will push the new
government to implement them in Tamil Nadu just as they have been
implemented in West Bengal.
Social Fragments and Voter Patterns
The election results are by no means a verdict on the agrarian
question only, but indicate multiple factors at work. This is the first
election in Tamil Nadu in which the leading party did not win a majority
of the seats in the legislature. The DMK-led alliance won 164 of the 234
seats but DMK alone won only 96 seats and will have to depend on its DPA
partners to sustain the new government. The Congress Party won an
impressive 35 out of the 40 seats it contested, while the CPI(M) and CPI
won 9 and 6 seats respectively. These parties have decided to support
the new governments from the outside without representation in the
cabinet which is drawn from the DMK legislators only
By winning 61 seats against the DMK's 96, the AIADMK has shown that
although defeated it has retained a strong electoral base in the State.
In fact, it has made significant inroads in traditional DMK territory.
In Chennai, the capital district, the AIADMK ended the DMK's total
monopoly by winning seven of the 14 district seats, and it did even
better in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu's industrial capital and the home of
the Gounder caste, winning 10 of the 14 seats and reducing the DMK's
tally from 8 to 4.
Another feature of the voting pattern is the shift in party loyalties
across caste boundaries. The 1977 split of the DMK into the Karunanidhi
faction and the splinter ADMK faction led by Jayalalitha's mentor and
acting partner M. G. Ramachandran came to be sustained mostly by their
separate bases among the so called non-Brahmin backward castes. DMK has
had its vote bank among the Vanniyars in the north-central and upper
north districts of the State, while the ADMK has been relying on the
Thevars who are distributed among the southern, western and the Cauvery
Delta districts.
Interestingly in this election, the two castes have spilt along
district lines and supported both parties. Additionally, the Vanniyars
have their own party now (Pattali Makkal Katchi - PKP); the PKP won 17
seats and is supporting the new government. On the other hand, the DMK
and its Congress ally have maintained their traditional support among
the minority Muslim, Christian and the Dalit (Harijan) groups.
Only 22 of the new legislators are women, accounting for less than
10% and far short of the targeted 33%. Women's groups have called on the
new government to implement the widow's pension scheme as promised and
make the State Commission on Women a statutory body. Jayalalitha had put
the Commission into disuse but tried to address the gender question in
her own matriarchal way by promising in her manifesto to give four grams
of gold to marrying women.
From separatist demagogue to national powerbroker
Tamil Nadu, previously Madras, was one of the first sates in the
Indian Union to raise the cry of separation. The DMK which raised the
cry and its offshoot AIADMK have alternated as the governing party for
nearly 40 years, but Tamil nationalism or even regionalism was hardly an
issue in the recent election. The Sri Lankan Tamil question was also not
an issue in the Tamil Nadu election despite claims to the contrary south
of the Palk Straits.
The political debate in Tamil Nadu is no longer about the Aryan North
versus the Dravidian South but about which political alliance in the
state is more capable of working with Delhi for the benefit of Tamil
Nadu.
No one signifies the shift from regional separatism to functional
federalism better than the DMK leader M. Karunanidhi, once the past
master of alliterative separatist rhetoric but now a shrewd bargainer
and a formidable powerbroker on the national political stage. At 83,
despite not unfounded allegations of family bandyism, Karunanidhi has
won again and is now Chief Minister for the fifth time since 1969. |