The incumbent jinx

Independent of parties and leaders, and also the search for a viable “third alternative”, the May 16 Assembly polls in Tamil Nadu will be watched, and remembered, for the possibility of chief minister J. Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK breaking the state’s historic electoral jinx. Will the Tamil Nadu voter give the AIADMK a second term in a row, after its triumph over its rival Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in 2011?

Historically, Tamil Nadu has voted out the incumbent almost since 1967, or even earlier when a viable alternative in the united DMK, leading a disparate group of anti-Congress parties, came into sight. If it did not happen, may be it was due to “linguistic reorganisation” of the post-Independence Part-A Madras State, where the pre-split Communist Party was the main Opposition.

In the first general election of 1951-52, the Congress, with no visible challenger anywhere in the country, lost in Punjab, and in a way even in Madras state. After Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru talked Rajaji into becoming chief minister, it was left to the latter to engineer the wholesale crossover of two Vanniar-led parties.

Yet in the confidence vote the “nominated MLC” chief minister (another first), Rajaji could win only on the “casting vote” of Speaker A. Sivashanmugam Pillai. Two decades later, in neighbouring Kerala, chief minister C.H. Mohammed Koya (with the shortest term in office) won through the Speaker’s “casting vote”.

Some questions remain. Would the DMK have won the 1971 snap Assembly polls had it not been for the split in the Congress at the national level under Indira Gandhi in 1969? The united Congress had polled 42 per cent in 1967 against the DMK’s 40 per cent, with the latter’s disjointed alliance partners contributing the five per cent victory margin overall.

Post-1972 late actor-politician M.G. Ramachandran split from the DMK and founded the ADMK, later renamed AIADMK, to meet the “Emergency era” needs of a “nationalist all-India” image. Kamaraj died before the 1977 Assembly polls, which MGR swept and kept the state with himself till his death in 1987.

It’s easy to say that the “MGR wave” kept the DMK and former chief minister M. Karunanidhi in “vanvas” for 13 long years until 1989, but it’s only a half-truth. In 1977, there was a perceptible shift in the traditional 10 per cent “swing vote” in the state, from the Congress (1947) to the DMK (1957) and AIADMK (1977).

It’s another matter that the “swing voters” would go to the post-MGR Janaki faction of the AIADMK in actor Sivaji Ganesan’s company in 1989, to Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) and Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) in 1996 (despite the Rajiv Gandhi assassination in 1991 and the anti-Jaya wave five years later). It went with the late G.K. Moopanar’s Tamil Maanila Congress in the 1999 Lok Sabha polls he contested in the company of VCK and Puthiya Thamizhagam (PT) and to Vijaykanth’s DMDK in 2006.

MGR’s succession of victories was really a half-myth. After 1987, the AIADMK under his leadership won the 1980 Assembly polls due to two factors. One, desperate to return to power early, there was cross-voting between the DMK and the Congress, which negotiated as hard as it did in 2011 (68 seats) and got 100-plus in a total of 234. Their mutually-destructive, collective defeat was written into the script from the word go on both occasions.

It should be recalled that after Indira Gandhi’s return to power in 1980, she dismissed nine state governments, of which MGR’s was one. The actor-politician tasted defeat in the Lok Sabha polls just six months earlier, when his party won only two of the state’s 39 Lok Sabha seats against the DMK-Congress combine.

In the subsequent Assembly polls, MGR asked the people for justice against his unfair dismissal, as he was neither an active participant on the Janata Party side, nor anti-Indira like the Emergency-era DMK.

Five years later, in 1984, MGR swept the polls on a “sympathy wave” as he was away in an American hospital and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by her bodyguards.

Since MGR’s departure and the 1989 Assembly polls, the two Dravidian majors, DMK and AIADMK, have been alternating at Fort St. George, the seat of power, but only after winning polls in the company of other allies. This is the first time the AIADMK is fighting the Assembly polls without any major ally, as in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

The party won 37 of 39 seats in that election, and the “Lady” won against Narendra Modi, BJP PM candidate, who became the NDA’s victory mascot elsewhere. It’s still a dicey question if the AIADMK and all of Amma’s perceived achievements while in power and promised freebies for the future will do the trick.

The questions and doubts are not without reason either. One, the traditional anti-incumbency vote is virtually split between the DMK-Congress combine with smaller allies on one hand, and the DMDK-led combine on the other, and the go-it-alone PMK approach on the third side.

This is not to leave out the BJP, whose traditional two-plus per cent voteshare has surged in the past two decades only when it has a PM candidate in the Lok Sabha polls that the party had won later on. A sixth, more insignificant force, is that of filmmaker-politician Seeman, with his pan-Tamil outfit “Naam Tamizhar Katchchi” contesting in all 234 constituencies.

If Ms Jayalalithaa has not bothered about relatively bigger allies, it may be due to the perception that they exist only in name, without any substantial voteshare to add against the seats they would demand. It is no different in the DMK’s case. While Mr Karunanidhi was seen as openly wooing the DMDK, the issue was again over seat-sharing and the perception that Vijaykanth had lost much of his clout of 2006 (8%) and 2009 (10%). But Mr Karunanidhi couldn’t do without the Congress (41 seats) and Muslim parties, if only hoping for “minority consolidation” in their favour than whatever vote the individual parties bring.

The question is: Can Ms Jayalalithaa break the jinx of Tamil Nadu, or is a third alternative in the DMDK-led combine, even if as a spoiler for either the AIADMK or DMK, or both, thus technically leading to a “hung Assembly”, still a possibility in realistic terms?