Tamilnadu State Elections - Voters Show Fundamentalist Jayalalitha Government the Door
 

Mehul Kamdar 

Published on February 13, 2007

 

As I type this article, Indian voters in the state of Tamilnadu, my home state and home for 35 years have sent a clear message like their counterparts in the rest of India did in early 2004 - the Hindu fundamentalist Jayalalitha government has been resoundingly voted out and is in the last stages of being confirmed as defeated. J Jayalalitha was elected five years ago with an overwhelming mandate in a state where the people were fed up with slow economic growth under her arch rivals, the DMK, which has won today. She also delivered on the economic front with a slew of new businesses attracted to the state from the neighboring states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka , but it was her old, dictatorial ways and her extreme devotion to Hindu fundamentalism and to the caste system where she was born as a Brahmin that proved her undoing. The lesson in her defeat is one for all Indian politicians to ponder - compared to wealth, people prefer their individual liberties more.


As a state, Tamilnadu was the home state of the great social reformer, Thanthai Periyar (born E V Ramasamy Naicker) who agitated throughout his long life for the rights of the discriminated Hindu castes . It also is a state with the world�s biggest atheist movement, the Dravidar Kazhagam and yet it also sends more pilgrims to the annual pilgrimages at Sabarimala and Tirupati than probably the states where these Hindu shrines are based, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh respectively, send their own residents. And yet, under Periyar�s teaching and instructions, the Tamils have made strident reforms even when they are religious - the state does not name roads and streets after any leader using their caste names in a public distancing of itself from the Hindu caste system, and this move has no opposition at all from even devout Hindus. And, more importantly, both major parties there, the DMK and the AIADMK, are offshoots of the vehemently atheist social movement of Periyar, the DK.


To some extent or the other, both the DMK and the AIADMK have deviated from Periyar�s strict atheist norms - his statue near Napier Park has these words on it, �There is no god, there is no god, there is no god at al. He who believes in god is a fool, he who worships god is a barbarian, he who propagates god is a scoundrel.� But the late beloved leader of the DMK who broke away from the DK socialist movement, Anna Durai, broke away espousing his view that there was �only one community of people and only one god,� in a departure from the ideology of his mentor and ideological guide. While DMK leader M Karunanidhi has been an atheist in his personal life, he has tolerated religiosity among his followers more as a matter of political expediency though he faces lawsuits from the Hindu fundamentalists for some statem,ents of his including one where he is reported to have said that being a devout Hindu was like being a thief (of the liberty of the discriminated castes.) But it was in the AIADMK under Jayalalitha�s mentor and late Chief Minister and former film star M G Ramachandran that public religiosity made a comeback in the state - he was a devotee of a temple in Karnataka and she followed his religiosity with her own public religiosity.


That said, there was a difference - MGR as he was popularly known, was a man who was of poor meansas a youth, and he did not belong to any caste that had a place in Hinduism. He identified with the suffering of the low castes and, while he was religious, was sufficiently influenced by Periyar and Anna Durai to share their egalitarian ideals. It was his empathy for the poor - whether it was a grand gesture meant to attract votes or a matter of fact is something that historians are divided upon - that made him unbeatable in elections throughout his life. Other than the Marxists in West Bengal, there is perhaps no party other than the AIADMK under MGR that never lost an election in India. With Jayalalitha it has been a roller coaster ride - elected overwhelmingly once, she was voted out equally overwhelmingly losing even her personal seats in the next election following which she won again to be ousted this time. And, while her rule was always controversial, this recent government showed her saffron colors quite clearly to anyone who tried to look.


She started in an alliance with the Hindu fundamentalist BJP when she won five years ago, and rapidly worked to prove her own saffron credentials by banning conversions from Hinduism as a first step in showing her religious colors. This was followed by a rule that was authoritarian in the extreme, laying down a Hindutvaite code of behavior that extended to virtually every aspect of Tamilnadu residents� lives. Plays that she considered �obscene� were banned, Eve Ensler�s �Vagina Monologues� being a prominent example. Discotheques were regularly raided and their patrons beaten up by policemen who seemed to get away with just about anything. Two wheelers were stopped at night at several points on every major Chennai city road and checked, their riders frisked, while car drivers who were obviously more affluent and probably well connected never were. And, her policemen went into the city�s famous Anna Nagar Park and arrested hundreds of adult couples there, photographed and fingerprinted them and put their pictures in yellow rags as if they were those of wanted criminals. It did appear as if the common individual had no rights under her dispensation save what she chose to grant him/her.


Even those VIPs whom she did not like were extremely unsafe - her own opponent Karunanidhi was brutally arrested and manhandled on television in a message of intimidation to his party cadres . She also sent policemen into the offices of the newspaper The Hindu to arrest two reporters who wrote pieces that had been critical of her behavior in the state legislative assembly. It was as if she was monarch of all that she surveyed, her right there being none to dispute. Fractured, weak and ineffective governments at the Center in Delhi could not rein her in and neither could India�s atrociously inefficient judicial system, the less about which is said, the better. Until she came up against the one force that she could not get away with oppressing forever - the Tamil people. Freed as they were from the hegemony of caste oppression by Periyar and subsequent leaders, they did not take kindly to Jayalalitha�s poll alliance with caste absed parties. As a matter of fact, even the caste based parties on the DMK side do not seem to have done well at all. A state with mostly religious people and the world�s largest atheist movement side by side had decided that enough was enough. Jayalalitha was voted out, joining her erstwhile allies now turned enemies, the Hindu fundamentalist BJP, on the opposition benches.


There is a pattern in this for anyone who cares to look. India has democratic elections despite all it�s faults and where there is democracy, it may take time, but fundamentalists cannot rule. The same would be true of almost every other country where fundamentalists hold sway - perhaps, the reason for their turning whole nations into theocratic dictatorships is that they know the dangers of electoral politics to their religious authority. Hence we see emasculated �democracies� like Iran where a supreme council of mullahs decide who may stand for election at best and governments like the Taliban or the Saudi monarchy where there is absolute rule by theocrats at worst. It is obvious that I the USA, a few months before senate elections, the Christian Right Wing seems set for defeat in both the Senate as well as in the House of Representatives., and elections in as diverse regions as Latin America, Europe and India have shown what can happen when the people are given a chance to assert their rights. Hopefully, this message would carry to the extreme religious corners of the world and make some theocrats uneasy - we are probably not in as violent a world as Denis Diderot�s where he hoped that he would see the last king strangled with the intestines of the last priest, but today�s world has shown that the vote is a perfect instrument to help cast religious fundamentalist leaders into the dustbin.

 


Mehul Kamdar from Chicago is currently moderating Mukto-Mona forum. He was the editor of The Modern Rationalist under late M D Gopalakrishnan  and associated with various rationalist movements. He can be reached at [email protected]