Battleground Tamil Nadu- Jayalalitha's Race To Lose

As industrial growth slows, a sluggish AIADMK faces a confident but fractious DMK and an alliance looking formidable on paper.

- Satish Padmanabhan

Tamil Nadu is a foreign coun­ try: they do things differently there. People here might ask ‘Modi who?’ or ‘BJP what?’ on Anna Salai in downtown Chennai; Shahrukh Khan and Priyanka Chopra are far­ away figures, here Ajith and Tamannah Bhatia rule; no signage is in the national lan­guage except the sporadic Bharatiya Jeevan Beema; even a so­called state is­ sue (take, for example, the soup Karti Chidambaram is in), is dismissed with a shrug. If cycles for girls can win elec­tions in Bihar, here there is a buzz that Amma may announce free motorcycles; in Bihar, the loss to the exchequer due to prohibition is estimated at Rs 3,000 crore, in Tamil Nadu it would be as much as Rs 30,000 crore. In West Ben­ gal, the month­old Narada sting, show­ ing wads of currency notes of about Rs 3­5 lakhs being pushed into eager MLAs’ hands, is an election issue; here, Rs 10 crore seized in cash last week, allegedly meant for bribing voters, was on the front pages for two days. Here, everything—development, ambition, freebies, corruption, poverty, leaders’ cutouts—is Rajni­size.

But is the unthinkable waiting to happen in Tamil Nadu? Its people are famed for ditching one party for another every five years (this is oft-quoted, but still incredible: AIADMK got 133 seats in 1984, two in the 1989 polls, it came back with 164 in 1991, was trounced to four seats in 1996, won 132 in 2001. Alternately, the DMK won 151 in 1989, was smashed to two in 1991, bounced back with 173 in 1996 and went down to 31 in 2001.) Are they indecisive this time? A few months ago, Jayalalitha looked invincible, but as voting day approaches, the fight seems to be tougher than it appeared.