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.
