I turn on Jayalalithaa
That, of course, broke the AIADMK–Congress alliance. I hit back at Jayalalithaa by opening my next column in the Telegraph with the line:
When Jayalalithaa became Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, she presented a baby elephant to the Guruvayur temple. When I become CM of TN, I will present Jayalalithaa to the Guruvayur temple.
I am still to meet a woman who finds the line funny. My wife was, and remains, particularly disapproving of it. But I thought nothing more about it. Few Tamils know English and fewer still read the Kolkata Telegraph. But Jayalalithaa did, as I was soon to find out.
On 13 October 2003, Jayalalithaa was scheduled to visit Nagapattinam (the district in which Mayiladuturai then lay) to announce various development projects she had included in her recently announced budget. I thought this an opportunity to go along and present her a petition with respect to that portion of my constituency that fell in the district, particularly on the need to desilt a large waterbody that had the potential of irrigating hundreds of hectares of rich, fertile land.
I made the mistake of stopping, on my way to the meeting, at a specialty restaurant that served French cuisine in Karaikal, an enclave of the Union Territory of Pondicherry (now Puducherry) that had been under French colonial authority for centuries. So, I arrived after the function had started.
No sooner had I had taken my place on the stage, somewhat apologetically, in view of my late arrival, than one of her aides approached me and asked if I wished to speak before the Chief Minister. I was taken by surprise. However, I said I would be happy to do so but would limit myself to five minutes. I raised the issue of the water body and said my other requests were written in the petition, which I then presented to her.
The next speaker was the CM herself. She began by referring to my Telegraph article before thundering on about what a rotter I was. Furious at this onslaught, I walked up to her and said in English, ‘I thought this was a development function, not a political rally. You’re such a cheapskate.’ And I walked out. A stunned silence followed as I descended the ramp.
Rajakumar, much more au fait with the politics of what he had seen, dragged me to the car and pressed the driver to move off, ignoring the media that were beginning to crowd around the car. I was wondering what the urgency was as the car drove at breakneck speed out of Nagapattinam city, then through the narrow, congested streets of the Muslim pilgrimage town of Nagore Sharif, and finally across the bridge over the creek that the CM had just inaugurated.
It marked the border with Karaikal, ruled by the Congress. Karaikal was instantly identifiable because alcohol was cheap and plentifully available in the Union Territory of Pondicherry, and there were scores of AIADMK workers in their distinctive veshtis lying sprawled on the ground in consequence of excessively celebrating their ‘Amma’s’ arrival!
Here, the first of a caravan of vehicles full of incensed AIADMK goons caught up with us and parked itself diagonally across the road. Out came an irate ‘rowdy’, as they are labelled in Tamil, armed, luckily, with nothing more lethal than his rubber chappals. Within seconds our car was surrounded by a mob and its windows smashed to smithereens. I put up my glass, but not before the chappal-wielding goon had caught hold of my sleeve and torn a gaping hole in it.
I heard Rajakumar urging the driver to drive at full throttle, and we were soon able to put some distance between us and our assailants. Rajakumar realized that the mob would catch up with us before we reached the Tamil Nadu border, about 30 km further up, and indeed that the TN border guards might have been alerted to not let our vehicle through.
As Rajakumar had had some of his schooling in Karaikal, he was familiar with the layout of the town and so got us through the gates of the (Congress) government complex before any AIADMK man caught up with us. The complex included a guest house, which provided us refuge. The AIADMK carcade, not knowing we had diverted to the government complex, sped past us and must have been utterly bewildered to learn at the border that I had not gone through.
It was rumoured that Jayalalithaa was at the helipad, waiting to get news of her assailants having caught up with me before taking off. Had they done so in Tamil Nadu, we could not have shaken them off in the narrow lanes of Nagore Sharif; and if they had caught up with us on the bridge, it would have taken little effort to push me into the creek.
Rajakumar went up to his room and isolated himself for the next twenty-four hours calling everyone he knew, particularly the local DMK men. I, stirred but not shaken, retired to mine and called the Congress president, who was more amused than angered, and reprimanded me for being so foolish as to attend an AIADMK meeting.
Suddenly, a TV team from Sun TV, the DMK’s own, burst into my room. I faithfully recounted the truth of what had happened and remarked that I had not been injured beyond the sleeve of my shirt having been torn. I was then seated before the TV cameras and, before the cameras started rolling, one of the TV team tore my sleeve even further open so that the audience could better savour my pitiful plight.
It worked because the very moderate words I used to describe what had happened were blanked out, and instead a pseudo voice-over described in the most lurid terms the ‘assault’ on my person. Overnight, I became a darling of Sun TV viewers!
My next visitor was the local DMK MLA, accompanied by a doctor. They too seemed disappointed that I did not have more visible injuries. So, one of my fingers – although uninjured – was dressed in Elastoplast. The MLA assured me that the DMK would escort me safely to Mayiladuturai. I suddenly found myself transformed into a favourite of the very party I had excoriated for over a decade!
The DMK certainly knew how to catch an opportunity by the forelock. They came out to welcome me, so outraged were they, or, more probably, because they were under party orders to do so. The top DMK leader of Mayiladuturai constituency, Ko. Si. Mani, no admirer of mine, was yanked out of the train at Kumbakonam station on his leader’s orders and made to join me at a welcome meeting in my Mayiladuturai office (much against his will, I need hardly add).
The DMK cadres mobilized for my welcome far outnumbered the number of sympathetic Congress workers present. Next day, I found as I drove around the constituency, women coming out of their huts to greet me – so shocked were they by Sun TV’s (somewhat exaggerated) version of what had happened the previous day. (Later, it struck me that this would have been par for the course in West Bengal, but inter party violence in TN is so rare that Jayalalithaa deploying her goons to inflict physical injury on me was just not acceptable.)
On arrival in Madras en route to Delhi, I found that Rajakumar had arranged for me to speak to the DMK leader, Dr Karunanidhi, generally referred to by his honorific, ‘Kalaignar’ (Great Artiste), who invited me to meet him at his Gopalpuram residence.
I had great difficulty following his Tamil, largely because my grasp of the language was as weak as his was strong, and partly because of his guttural voice. Rajakumar later told me the thrust of his remarks was that the Congress had thoroughly misread him; that far from having been instrumental in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, he had deeply regretted it; and that he remained a great admirer of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, which is what had led him to coin his famous slogan,
‘Nehruvin magal varuga / Nilayana aatchi tharuga’ (Welcome to Nehru’s daughter / who will give us a stable government) – far more effective as a slogan in Tamil than in English translation. We then exchanged shawls and I took my leave, little realizing that the seeds had been sown for a Congress–DMK alliance that has lasted two decades and seems set to carry on forever.
To my surprise, Kalaignar seemed to look on me as a kind of symbol of his renewed relationship with the Congress. It worked to my immense advantage, because Mayiladuturai was announced as the very first constituency to be allotted to the Congress. When asked the standard question by the Congress observer as to how many seats he would allocate to the Congress, Kalaignar gave an answer eerily similar to the one given by Jayalalithaa five years earlier, ‘All the ones you can win.’
‘Which are those?’
Kalaignar replied, ‘Mani Shankar Aiyar.’
‘And?’ said the hapless observer.
‘You tell me,’ was the answer.
I attribute this to two basic reasons. One, my personal popularity among the people of Mayiladuturai despite my speaking only pidgin Tamil and overcomingthehandicapofmyBrahminorigins.Two,myunprecedented score of 72,411 votes when I stood as an independent.
The Lok Sabha was terminated by Prime Minister Vajpayee on 5 February 2004, several months before it was due to end, as he was under the hopelessly wrong impression that he was riding a wave of successes against a weak Opposition helmed by a lady of foreign origin whose public acceptance was in some doubt.
As the elections got under way, Kalaignar instructed the local leadership to ensure, on their (political) life, that I won. His son, ‘Dalapati’ Mu. Ka. Stalin, was present at my nomination and visited the constituency twice during the campaign. Kalaignar himself visited the constituency for a roadshow that lasted several hours, during the course of which he showered eloquent praise on me. Unsurprisingly, the margin of my victory was nearly 2,00,000.
This is an excerpt from A Maverick in Politics, published by Juggernaut Books. You can purchase the book here.