Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa will know later today whether she will still be the chief minister of the state or will have to step down. Her followers will know whether their puja has borne fruit.
Of the latter there have been many, supporters outdoing themselves in sponsoring them, one more elaborate than the other. A temple in Karuvadikuppam village in Puducherry saw a three-hour puja by the local Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (ADMK) MLA. Dedicated to the Goddess Amman, the prayer - called the "shatru samhara yagam" (a puja to destroy enemies) - was conducted by a 51-member team of pujaris. Several MLAs attended. The Vazhakarutheeswarar temple in Kanchipuram district is the spiritual haven of those plagued by legal problems. Unsurprisingly, it has many important people as devotees. Gossips said Jayalalithaa's friend, and the woman who might have to carry the legal can, Sasikala, ordered a puja there. That went on for a couple of hours.
The reason for this sudden burst of devotion is an 18-year-old case in which final orders will be issued later today. Jayalalithaa and her lawyers contend there is no case, only a plot hatched by political rivals to frame her. But the state says she has to explain how, if she was accepting a salary of Rs 1 from 1991 to 1996 as Tamil Nadu chief minister, she had not only acquired, in 1996, property amounting to Rs 66 crore, but also 880 kg of silver, 28 kg of gold, 750 pairs of shoes, 10,500 saris, 91 watches and whalf a dozen companies, allegedly held, benami, by Sasikala, foster son (since estranged) V N Sudhakaran and their relative J Elavarasi. A recent order of the special court that is hearing the case said these companies had failed to produce acceptable evidence to show "that the properties under attachment were the assets of the company as on the date of attachment" or that the properties were acquired with the funds of the company. So who really owned the companies and how did they come to own them? The answers to all these questions and more will be revealed today.
This is only the legal side of the matter. If Jayalalithaa is convicted, she will have to step down, if only pending appeal. This is not the first time. In 2001, the Supreme Court held Jayalalithaa's appointment under Article 164 to be illegal and unconstitutional since she had been convicted and sentenced to three years' imprisonment in a (different) graft case. On that occasion, she did not resign, but merely asked the Governor (C Rangarajan) to appoint her nominee as chief minister: O Panneerselvam, a harmless, docile MLA from Periakulam. He apparently conducted himself with aplomb as chief minister because, the Chennai chatterati says, he could be a stand-in chief minister again.
But that was then, and this is now. Then, Tamil Nadu was not one of India's preferred destinations for investment and business. Today, barring power shortages, Tamil Nadu is right up there for ease of business. Getting land is - relatively - less of a problem and industry leaders confess that they have had to pay to smoothen their way in Gujarat but had no problems in Tamil Nadu - provided they followed the law. Tamil Nadu has next to no labour problems. Unlike in Jammu & Kashmir, where the state just vanished when its citizens came face to face with a natural calamity, Tamil Nadu has a system that has the capacity to fight back. The administration is caring - Jayalalithaa's inexpensive meals scheme, her subsidised pharmacies and the freebies (including cash) that accompany every election might not make for a healthy democracy, but do represent a winning formula (ADMK won 37 out of the 39 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 clocking 44 per cent of the vote share).
There are, of course, aberrations. She is largely an absentee chief minister, putting in just a few hours at the Secretariat, leaving it to the bureaucracy to guess what she might want. She spends four months of the summer in the Tamil Nadu hills. For several months now, industry's efforts to meet her to solve small problems have failed. She is simply inaccessible, frustratingly so. Problems of the sugar sector (where the state government could have helped) or even big multinationals like Nokia (for which, incidentally, the company has only itself and its financial advisors to blame) could have benefited from the chief minister's intervention. But this has been pretty much absent. It is unspeakably depressing. With just a little bit of effort, Tamil Nadu could have been propelled as India's best-run state. Today, there are murmurs that because of Narendra Modi's efforts, Gujarat is cornering the glory that Tamil Nadu deserves as well.
No one seems to see any irony in the fact that of all Indian politicians, it is Tamil Nadu politicians against whom the most gigantic cases of corruption have been registered. In this Alice in Wonderland scenario, it seems entirely appropriate that Vaiko, the man who has the least in the current political scenario, should have given a "clarion call" to all parties opposing Jayalalithaa to come together and save democracy. Very few have heeded the call. So right now, Jayalalithaa is her own ruling party and her own opposition. And maybe later today, a proxy chief minister as well!
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