It wasn’t the best of times to be in the news business. The demands were many and varied as the former Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa was hospitalised late evening on September 22.
There were friends wanting to know what was going on while contacts were telling us what the diagnosis and prognosis were, but we couldn’t pass on everything we heard or knew. To start with, the news was grimmer than we were led to believe by vacuous hospital releases. When she recovered quite miraculously considering the gravity of multi-organ problems, the insider dope helped up the general optimism.
When they said ‘cardiac arrest’ you knew the game was up. You didn’t have to be a boffin to know the employment of an extracorporeal heart beater called ECMO was in reality ‘end stage’ in medical parlance. As irony would have it, the truth may have surfaced first on Jaya TV when a slide meant for storing popped up on screen accidentally and several other Tamil channels picked it up to jump the gun in the race for TRPs channels are famous for eternally chasing.
The announcement set off huge tremors at the hospital and its new corridor of power in the second floor where an orderly late evening announcement may have been planned before it spilled out in disorderly fashion.
In this post-truth era it is going to be extremely hard to differentiate between truth and untruth, fact and fiction, more so since a combination of both was in hospital releases as well as in the made-for-television diehard optimism of a legislator named after the goddess of learning.
The neutral arbiters in AIIMS doctors had to be called in to pass an official verdict on the famous patient, a decision that private doctors and the party and government bigwigs would have been chary of taking. This is the Tamil Nadu way in dealing with the high and mighty and here we were talking of the highest in the land.
So long as she was alive, Jayalalithaa was a terror to those who served her. And she had reason to believe she could lord it over everyone until grave illness took her. After all, she died after achieving a sort of political miracle of being re-elected in the famous alternating 5-year cycle of the Dravidian vote of Tamil Nadu. And, regardless of the sniggers in legal and political circles, she died only after being exonerated in the DA case that had dogged her for a full two decades.
Her career also involved periods of incarceration, which must be the lowest ebb in any politician’s life. But she parlayed it into political capital by playing the martyr to perfection.
Those who benefited from her rule were those so beholden as to have to bend and genuflect. This was the most embarrassing aspect of her latest periods in office when each minister used to risk his vertebrae in bending over to please her as her car left the Secretariat in Fort St George. Those who prostrated before her were mostly party cadre and they worshipped her as Amma. But her Cabinet ministers tried to outdo each other in sycophancy, which became a trademark of TN politics. It remains to be seen if that era of genuflection is finally over and we are already in a phase of life in which it appears the last of the titans of Tamil Nadu has passed away and none might achieve her demigod status in the future. There isn’t enough evidence yet although it did appear ministers have not yet got over the habit of prostrating as seen in Poes Garden recently.
In the politics of branding, Jayalalithaa was nonpareil. Those who are well off tended to see only her authoritarian side. Where the real Jaya effect was to be seen was in the rural areas, the land beyond the glitz of the malls in high street shopping areas of modern India.
To the poor, she was a goddess beyond compare. She looked after their every need. You have to go into that hinterland to see the effect of her schemes. There are no Amma canteens there as in the cities and larger towns. That is where her most loyal subjects lived and who felt the impact of the thoughtfulness behind giving some livestock so a family or person could get some income and a life.
Her mystique was to become even more intriguing than that of the man who brought the reluctant politician into the mainstream.
In time, she became the guardian angel who brought to their lives genuine aid, tending to their hunger, their thirst and their health. She could be inaccessible, appearing less and less in public in her last stint as CM after being given the mathematical benefit of doubt in the DA case in Bengaluru. But she was ever present through her branding.
‘Amma is there for you’ was a cleverly cultivated pictorial presence in one of the biggest personality cults in modern India and this was not in the social media so much as in the heart of Tamil Nadu, near its paddy fields.
Things could change quickly in politics, especially in view of her declining vote share and wafer thin margins in many seats. But she leaves a legacy for her party in a clear majority that could last the next four and a half years if they are clever enough to keep themselves together.
The men and women of AIADMK owe a lot to their vote catcher who has given them another term in office. To me, she leaves pleasant memories of five meetings with her between 2002 and 2013 that lasted nearly an hour each time and in which she was grace personified.
