J Jayalithaa has scrapped several projects started by M Karunanidhi. But that’s only in keeping with Tamil Nadu’s politics of oneupmanship.
If you ignore the signage, the glass facade of the Anna Centenary Library in Kotturpuram in south Chennai makes it looks like yet another software park, like the ones in adjoining Thiruvanmayoor. The library, an impressive eight-storey structure, was inaugurated on September 15 last year to mark the 102nd birth anniversary of former Tamil Nadu chief minister Conjeevaram Natarajan Annadurai (1909-1969) or “Anna”, as he was known. When it was opened to the public, it was marvelled at as one of the largest in South Asia (the 375,000-square-feet building houses more than 500,000 books and can accommodate double that number); for its facilities, such as the Braille section and the unique “own books” section where you can bring your own books to read; as well as for giving Cambridge University Press its biggest order ever (worth £1.27 million, with the invoice alone running into 2,794 pages). Sure enough, a walk through its interiors cannot but leave you dazed, if only at its size and mindboggling variety — there are 19 sections under architecture alone and 14 under photography, apart from obscure titles that would thrill a bibliophile’s soul such as the multi-volume Passenger And Immigration Lists Index.
The library was a feather in the cap of then chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi who inaugurated it. And that seemed to have been its undoing — the Anna Centenary Library was back in the news recently when Chief Minister Jayalalithaa Jayaram suddenly declared that the library would be shifted to a proposed knowledge park in Nungambakkam, a different quarter of the city, while the present building would become a super-specialty pediatric hospital.
In the initial days of her third term as chief minister of Tamil Nadu, many commented that this time around “Amma” seemed to be displaying more maturity and calm compared to her tempestuous earlier stints in power. However, by cancelling, reversing or modifying a raft of her predecessor’s initiatives in later months, it looked more and more as if Jayalalithaa was returning to the template of “vendetta politics” associated with the state, with the library being merely the latest to come in her crosshairs.
That list of “targets” starts with the announcement, as soon as she took over in May this year, that the government would function from the Colonial-era Fort St George, instead of the over Rs 1,000-crore assembly-cum-secretariat complex built by the Karunanidhi-led DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), on the grounds that the mammoth structure was yet to be completed and the government could not function effectively from two separate locations. Not an unexpected turn of events, since she had vowed at the time of its inauguration in 2010 that she would not step into the new assembly complex and had reiterated this during her poll campaign. It was another two months before she finally announced that the abandoned building would be put to use, not as a secretariat, but as a hospital “along the lines of AIIMS (the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi)” and a medical college.
In June, the rollbacks gathered momentum with the scrapping of Kalaignar Health Insurance Scheme and Kalaignar Housing Scheme (Kalaignar roughly means exponent of arts and is used as a title for Karunanidhi), both of which she said would be replaced with better ones; halting the distribution of free colour televisions (another pet Karunanidhi project); overturning DMK’s bid to revive the legislative council which had received the Centre’s assent; and declaring that the government would construct a 111-km monorail in Chennai instead of extending the metro rail, work on which had already begun.
While all these decisions sailed through more or less smoothly, Jayalalithaa’s attempt to stall implementation of the unified education system (earlier, the state had different education boards, each with its own curriculum), “Samacheer Kalvi”, was thwarted by the courts — a relief to the students who were attending school without textbooks for at least two months. Before the students got their hands on the books, however, she launched a massive operation to blacken laudatory references in the books to Karunanidhi, as well as daughter Kanimozhi’s poetry. In the following months, she also announced that the Tamil New Year would be celebrated in the month of Chithirai in April as it used to before DMK shifted it to January, and, in a ludicrous move, ordered that the board of the Semmozhi Poonga, a biodiversity park in the city built by her predecessors, be covered! Even more farcical is the case of 12,000 public welfare workers, known as “Makkal Nala Paniyalargals”, who were summarily dismissed last month — they were appointed by DMK first in 1989 and have been sacked every time Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) has come to power, only to be reinstated when the pendulum swung the other way.
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The revenge politics played out in the state is a result of the ideologies of the two principal parties, or, rather, the lack of it, says C Lakshmanan, political science professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. “With both DMK and AIADMK laying claim to Anna and championing the Dravidian movement, there is hardly any difference between the two ideologically. And when there is ideological bankruptcy, parties tend to resort to personality cult, vengeance and the politics of oneupmanship,” he says. However, he feels Jayalalithaa’s recent decisions are not just about revenge. “She has not cancelled everything DMK did, only the projects in which she thought there was rot that needed to be dealt with,” says Lakshmanan, citing allegations of corruption in the construction of the secretariat and assembly complex and in the Kalaignar Health Insurance Scheme. At the same time, he stresses that Jayalalithaa failed in her responsibility as Opposition leader by letting these projects come up. “She could have mobilised her cadres and public opinion against them, instead of allowing the projects to come up and then tearing them down.”
Charges of corruption and mismanagement apart, Karunanidhi might have been setting himself up for a fall with what appear to be attempts to create a legacy. “Karunanidhi wants to be imprinted in the minds of people for posterity in a certain way. He has a tendency to lend his names to projects, whether it is health insurance or housing, unlike Jayalalithaa who seems to have a more impersonal approach to schemes; you won’t find any in her name,” says Sashi Kumar, chairman of the Media Development Foundation in Chennai, which runs the Asian College of Journalism.
The rollbacks game can also be viewed as a reflection of the difference in strategy adopted by the two rivals: Jayalalithaa favours a frontal attack, while Karunanidhi is known to operate with more subtlety. Lakshmanan points out their contrasting approaches to the Sri Lankan Tamils issue: while Jayalalithaa announced in the Assembly that economic sanctions need to be imposed on Sri Lanka for atrocities against Tamils, Karunanidhi got away with fasting between breakfast and lunch. In another instance, Karunanidhi effectively took the sheen off Jayalalithaa’s “bicycles for the girl child” scheme by announcing that bicycles would be given to both boys and girls.
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Cho Ramaswamy, political analyst, editor of Tughlak magazine and an AIADMK sympathiser, too feels that Jayalalithaa is only altering those schemes that did not benefit the people. “The secretariat was a half-baked idea, with a temporary facade created just before the inauguration by a film set designer (art director Thota Tharani). That’s why no one was bothered when she announced it would be shifted,” he says. The issue was also part of her election manifesto, and she got a clear mandate during the polls, he points out. Indeed, the secretariat complex at the Omandurar Government Estate had attracted its share of controversies, even without any help from Jayalalithaa. The Comptroller and Auditor General, for instance, had hauled up the DMK government over the same fake dome, terming the Rs 3 crore spent on the temporary structure “wasteful expenditure”. There are also allegations that the contracts for the secretariat, library and other projects went to a certain Malaysian contractor, supposed to be closely linked to the “First Family”, says Cho.
Jayalalithaa has tried to justify her rollbacks. For instance, she has said that most of the funds in the health insurance scheme were cornered by private hospitals. This ensured that her rollbacks didn’t create a furore. And even though there were murmurs about the wisdom of converting a structure meant to be a secretariat into a hospital and the money that would be needed for it, the allegations of corruption around it, aided by the fact that it was not a building used by the common man, ensured they remained murmurs. The Anna Centenary Library, however, is turning out to be a different kettle of fish. There was a public outcry over Jayalalithaa’s announcement, with The Hindu running a series of articles which featured different people extolling the virtues of the library and Save-Anna-Centenary-Library groups being formed on Facebook.
So far, DMK seems to be unable to do anything about the rollbacks, apart from expressing anger. “How many of our schemes will she reverse? Will she now shift the main bus terminus from Koyambedu, since that was also our government’s initiative,” asks DMK’s organising secretary and Member of Parliament TKS Elangovan. The chief minister’s office did not respond to requests for an interview, and an emailed questionnaire went unanswered.
The bigger question, of course, is what the impact of all these decisions will be on AIADMK’s electoral prospects. Jayalalithaa followed up her victory in the May 2011 elections, where the party with its allies won 204 of the 234 seats in the assembly, by winning the local body elections and, recently, the Trichy West by-elections. Although the costs of her rollbacks will eventually be paid out of public money, what will affect the electorate directly will be the increase in bus fares, price of milk and electricity tariff, announced after the by-election in October, instead of in the budget. But by introducing these tough measures at the beginning of her term, and at one go, Jayalalithaa could blunt any outrage at the hustings later. And with the House of Karunanidhi mired in the 2G scandal, combined with fears of a split among his children, Jayalalithaa can hope to play a pivotal role in the 2014 general elections.
As for the Anna Centenary Library, built at a cost of around Rs 170 crore, it might yet escape the fate of the secretariat. For one, the courts might come to its rescue, as in the case of Samacheer Kalvi. Cho points out that by announcing that it would be shifted only after the knowledge park comes up (work on which is yet to begin), the government has made it evident it will not happen immediately. He expresses what many Chennaites feel: “The library is something that’s unique to the city — it should be left alone.” Is Amma listening?
