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It is 11 am and Radhakrishnan Nagar in Chennai, from where Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa is seeking re-election, is oppressively warm. The odour of fresh and decaying jasmine, sweat, coconut oil and dry fish hangs thick over its narrow bylane, which could well be one of the most picturesque streets in India.
From a shrine, St Jude, in blue and white robes, smiles down benignly at his followers. Some 50 yards away stands a massive statue of what looks like Parashakthi (the Eternal Mother of Hinduism). And right opposite it, wedged between other tiny tenements, is a 30-square-metre dwelling that calls itself, somewhat grandiloquently, Jeb House. It has a picture on the door of an Old Testament character slaying somebody (the picture is too faded to make out who the unfortunate victim is). Children are running around the street giggling and the women are dressed in shiny, new saris, their foreheads smeared with kumkum and their hair adorned with flowers. Suddenly, the air of expectancy is broken by the cacophony of nadaswaram players and drummers trying to outdo each other. A song from a 1965 MG Ramachandran (MGR) movie, Aayirathil Oruvan (one in a thousand), starts playing on the loudspeaker. (This smash hit featuring the MGR-Jayalalithaa pair, before MGR became a politician, had the hero portraying a leader of the oppressed.) “Thonrumbodhu thaayillaamal thonravillaiye (we wouldn’t even exist without our mother),” goes the song picturised on MGR. The drummers bang on maniacally. The sound of crackers bursting tells us that the chief guest — the law minister of Tamil Nadu — has arrived.
“He’s the man with a mottai (tonsured head)” says Magesh, a volunteer of All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, or AIADMK, who has a small grocery shop in the neighbouring Tirupur district but has stationed himself at RK Nagar for a month for the election. Why the tonsured head? “He shaved his head to express gratitude when Amma (Jayalalithaa) was acquitted” says Magesh. And so did many others in the council of ministers.
In another bylane, also campaigning is one of Jayalalithaa’s 22 challengers — a candidate of the Communist Party of India. He too has some crowd with him and also some drummers. Will he win? A supporter replies with dignity, “He should get a large number of votes.” But who will win? Magesh doesn’t bother to answer. He simply points to a picture of Jayalalithaa.
It is pure theatrics, utterly entertaining. But then, this is Tamil Nadu — a state where the poor define the fate of its politicians. And that explains why the state goes all out to take care of its poor, from the cradle to the grave. Such are the pressures of competitive politics that politicians constantly have to think of new ideas to sell to the poor. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to the poor is aspirational and a variant of the Protestant work ethic, the Dravidian parties seek to find ways to keep the person content in poverty. AIADMK’s election manifesto for the 2011 assembly elections is an example of this. It offered a whole lot of free goodies to the poor, especially women: fan, a mixie and a grinder, four grams of gold in addition to Rs 25,000 as marriage assistance (Rs 50,000 and four grams of gold for those with a diploma or a degree), subsidised rice, dals, medicines and more. Later, the party also came up with a scheme to give free goats and sheep.
On the face of it, this should have been the mother of all ponzi schemes like the many the state has known: teak farming, emu breeding, chit funds offering 46 per cent returns and so on. In Bihar, for example, Lalu Prasad had tried to run the free fodder scheme, but because no fodder was ever distributed and the money went from the treasury to unknown bank accounts, he had to go to jail.
But here in Tamil Nadu, astonishingly and apparently defying all odds, the schemes work.
Sekamkulam in Kanchipuram is a hamlet adjoining Attaputtur, a village with a scheduled caste majority. Lakshmy Muthuswamy is the proud recipient of four free goats — one male and three female. She got them in 2011 when she used to live in a thatched hut. Now she has a pucca house painted in a mind-numbing shade of fluorescent green “financed” entirely by the offspring of those goats. “I crossed the goats and got kutties (kids). I sold four in the first two years and eight later. I got about Rs 40,000 and with that I rebuilt my house,” she says, caressing the head of one of the kutties that is unlikely to have known that it would end up in biryani as soon as it is around eight months old.
V Panneer Selvam, regional joint director of animal husbandry in Kanchipuram, knows every beneficiary of the free goat (or sheep, though that is not as popular) scheme by name. He explains the goat economy. Goats are given free to a set of people according to qualifying conditions: they must be from a below-poverty-line family, must not possess any other milch animal and should be landless. The families are selected by a village committee. These families are then given the goats and the state bears the charges for free insurance — if the goat dies within one year, it is replaced free of cost. Some feed concentrate is also given free and the beneficiaries are given training on how to rear the animal that is delivered at their doorstep with the state bearing the transportation cost.
Goats mature within six to eight months of birth. This is when they are most valuable — and the tastiest. They can be crossed twice in a year and can be sold for around Rs 2,500. The first breeding is likely to yield two kids. But after that, they could give birth to triplets and even quintuplets. “There are families (of beneficiaries) that take care of the goats they get — and those that don’t or can’t. The ones that do, improve their standard of living significantly within the first three years,” says Panneer Selvam.
Jayalalithaa is the first to have introduced a free goat/sheep/cow scheme. The earlier Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, or DMK, government had a similar project but that only offered a subsidy for the animals. The state spends Rs 13,000 on every lot of four goats it gives. Asset verification is done once a month where the infertility problems of the goats are also addressed. Corruption is rare — the threat of an FIR is always hanging over the heads of those who believe they can take the government for a ride by selling the goat and misrepresenting to get more goats. The main thing is that the programme is monitored rigorously: every expense, down to a pin, is listed and the beneficiaries are chosen in full public view. The village panchayat knows the circumstances of all the landless in its area. The district collector is the overall in charge. Together, these institutions act as checks and balances.
In theory, panchayat elections are partyless. But in Tamil Nadu, they are effectively fought along party lines. The party takes its programme forward by rolling out its promises through the panchayat. When Mutuswamy says fervently, closing her eyes and folding her hands, “it is all because of Amma”, it sounds like a cliché, but it is her truth.
Driving out poverty being the primary political concern is fine. But one also has to keep feeding the election machinery. And someone has to pay for it. For that, there are two sources: liquor and real estate.
The state has its own alcohol distribution network called Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (TASMAC). This came into being after a spate of deaths caused by spurious liquor in the 1980s. In November 2003, as chief minister, Jayalalithaa announced that the government would take over private retail sale of alcohol in the state — with TASMAC having the monopoly to buy liquor from manufacturers and sell it to consumers. With Tamil Nadu accounting for more than 15 per cent of all alcohol consumption in India, this became a huge business — not just for the government but also for alcohol makers. Consider the numbers: 27 per cent of the revenue generated by Tamil Nadu in 2012-13 came from the sale of alcohol: excise revenue amounted to over Rs 12,000 crore and sales tax added up to nearly Rs 9,600 crore. This was basically the state collecting tax and paying it back to itself. But because the state is the regulator, money could be made in other ways: by enabling some distillers to enter TASMAC outlets for a fee, while keeping others out.
Real estate clearances are the other source of rent-seeking. Investors have been thronging Tamil Nadu — it is the third largest recipient of foreign direct investment. But last month, when the Andhra Pradesh chief secretary arrived in Chennai to solicit investment for SriCity, his state’s offering to industry as India’s biggest multi-product special economic zone, he found the demand staggering. FoxConn, which has taken over the controversial Nokia plant in Chennai, is moving to SriCity; Bosch, which has just inaugurated a Rs 50-crore facility in Tamil Nadu, would like to move if it could; and while car majors like Hyundai are staying, Tamil Nadu does not figure in their expansion plans.
A top bureaucrat in the state says, “No change of government in Tamil Nadu has ever caused investors to revise their plans. The Chennai Metro Rail was not as a result of this government — it was the brainchild of DMK, but it is on. (Power) from Koodankulam has had its share of problems. But that too is pushing ahead.” His point is: the institutional system in Tamil Nadu works, so the chief minister can delegate.
But the fact is that uncertainties have taken a toll on investment and rent-seeking from regulatory authorities has gone up. During the period when Jayalalithaa was in jail, administration went on smoothly, even though inaugurations and public tamasha were not evident. But investors say the “rate” for per square feet of real estate clearance went up from Rs 30 to Rs 60 in a few weeks. Ministers began double- and triple-crossing potential investors, and each other. For a while, there was mayhem.
For the real estate sector, Tamil Nadu is still a complicated terrain to traverse. But with Jayalalithaa back in the saddle, the policy regime is likely to be a bit more predictable.
But is it really? Recent reports say the chief minister’s health is a matter of great concern. Even before her conviction, months would go by and she would not meet ministers and bureaucrats. Officers had to go to her residence, send in files, wait to be buzzed in or wait for the files. The wait could last for hours, even days. In most cases, she would not meet them at all; the file would come back with notings.
When she was in jail, the pressure on the bureaucrats was to be more succinct and clear in their notes because there was no possibility for a face-to-face discussion. Things were run via a committee of bureaucrats headed by advisor Sheela Balakrishnan. In some ways, clearance was faster.
She is back now but the chief minister is as inaccessible as ever. Everyone at the 28-minute swearing-in noticed that the national anthem had to be cut short because she was finding it difficult to stand. There was a proposal to let her file her nomination for the election to the assembly from home, but the Election Commission ruled that out. As she operates, her friend and confidante Sasikala is very much in evidence. It is pretty much a “rule by the buzzer”.
Now, if the chief minister meets few people, has little contact with the outside world, how does she keep tabs on what her colleagues are doing? Through a complicated system of intelligence gathering, say bureaucrats, which involves calling for reports from the state intelligence departments as well as from “loyal” bureaucrats and party workers.
What if the Supreme Court rules that her acquittal was wrong? In RK Nagar, nobody is thinking about that. All they can see is Jayalalithaa — and the gold that’s going to pave their streets.
