‘Amma’ – the late Jayalalithaa – was the very epitome of an authoritarian leader, if by ‘authoritarian’ we understand rule by fiat, with little regard for the values of liberal democracy. Those who have seen and listened to Simi Garewal’s famous interview with her, recorded in 1999, may wonder, as I have done, how such an extraordinarily reserved, self-controlled – rather cold – woman can possibly have come to be seen as ‘Amma’, as ‘mother’, by so many Tamilians.¹ Though Simi Garewal succeeded in getting Jayalalithaa, who was then out of power, to admit to emotions that anyone could relate to – girlish crushes for a handsome cricketer and a once celebrated film star, loneliness, vulnerability – it did not make her seem any more approachable. Not once did she allow her composure to slip. Five years later, in a ‘Hard Talk’ interview for the BBC, Karan Thapar succeeded in making her very angry, but even then she remained icily controlled.² She seemed always to remain a remote figure. What was it about her that gave her such extraordinary power over so many people? And how did her particular brand of authoritarianism relate to democracy?

The immediate cause of her rise to power was that she was so close to ‘Mr M.G. Ramachandran’, as she refers to MGR in her interview with Garewal. And of MGR, she said to the journalist Vaasanthi, in an interview conducted in the 1980s when she was still only a member of the Rajya Sabha, that one had to be in Tamil Nadu to ‘see how people worship him. He is no ordinary mortal to them. He is their God.’³ Then, following MGR’s death, party loyalists turned finally to her as their saviour, in preference to Janaki Ramachandran, the great man’s widow. She had seemed to Vaasanthi to be saying, ‘Watch out, the people will one day accept me as their goddess.’⁴ And so it proved to be. She seemed to have an instinctive feel for the apparently irrational need of Tamilians for an awe-inspiring leader who should be worshipped. The void that has been left following her death has been all too apparent, in the confusion and conflict in her party.

There are, no doubt, psychological explanations for the way in which Tamilians relate to their leaders. Equally, it can also be explained in the context of a political culture formed by the mytho-history created by Dravidian writers that described leaders of the past, such as the kings of the Chola dynasty, who were the embodiment of Tamil greatness. Narendra Subramanian, in an interesting footnote in his book on Tamil politics, refers to a time in 1953 when Nehru travelled to Madras to open a science exhibition, and the DMK protested, demanding space also for a cultural exhibition of Tamil history. As Subramanian says, the dispute reflected ‘contrasting approaches to the formation of the citizen. To Nehru, who placed the spirit of science and rationality at the core of nation-building, the DMK’s demands [relating to the projection of a mythical history] could only appear nonsensical.’ Yet, there are strong grounds for arguing that the Dravidian leaders spoke to the masses far more effectively than Nehru did.⁵

 

At the same time the history that the Dravidian ideologues taught presented a conception of political relations as inherently unequal and requiring a practice of subservience to leaders in a way that is quite fundamentally at odds with democratic values.⁶ The prostrations before Jayalalithaa of even the most senior politicians in her party, the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, betrayed the lack of anything much resembling internal party democracy. As I have observed, in Tamil society there remains a tendency amongst men to look for the figure of annan – an elder brother who can be turned to for guidance and support – reflecting, no doubt, the moral logic of claiming relatedness with a superior on whom one is, in some way, dependent. But the element of hierarchy and subordination is plain: it is a relationship with an elder brother rather than a claim of fraternal solidarity. The relationship of men with their mothers is not very different, and according to Vaasanthi, under Jayalalithaa’s leadership, ‘slavishness, subservience and sycophancy reached a peak.’⁷ Even politicians with strong local support always had to display sycophancy and loyalty to the ‘Leader’ in order to survive.

 

There is a sense in which the way many of the Tamil people regarded Jayalalithaa, as they had done MGR before her, presents a particular case of the attitude of bhayam-bhakti (fear and devotion) that Pamela Price has described in an essay on what she calls the political cosmologies of South India. In their relations with the deities and the rulers and village lords on whom they depended for their well-being, people saw respectful subordination as being necessary. ‘Ideally one gave respect and received respect (but) not on terms of equality’, and the threat of force was ever-present. Jayalalithaa to Tamilians was a ‘mother’ who, like a goddess, inspired both fear and devotion.⁸

It took Jayalalithaa some time, however, to learn to appear as a personal benefactor to her followers. In her first period in office (1991-96) the personality cult surrounding her became extreme, reflected in the huge cut-out figures of her that were set up all over the state, and in ritualistic expressions of devotion. She seemed then not to have realized the importance of reciprocation in what is implicitly or actually a patron-client relationship with voters. But over time she became a leader who successfully claimed to represent the common man, the ordinary Tamilian (and especially Tamil women), even though one whose way of relating was anything but egalitarian.

 

Jayalalithaa’s party, the AIADMK – always much less institutionalized than the DMK – remained a following rather than a democratic organization, over which she exercised absolute control, offering no room at all for internal dissent. As Narendra Subramanian showed, the AIADMK, under both MGR and Jayalalithaa, has been intolerant of opposition and perfectly ready to use repression. MGR, he tells us, ‘created a niche in the police force, occupied by trusted officials, which oversaw the politically sensitive aspects of social control.’ The use of repressive methods was then extended even further in Jayalalithaa’s first administration.⁹ A lawyer member of the PUCL in Chennai once said to me that, under Jayalalithaa, Tamil Nadu had become a ‘police state’.

Jayalalithaa shuffled her cabinet on as many as 24 occasions in the first four and a half years of her government in 2011-16. She rarely attended sessions of the state legislature (appearing on only ten days in total over the period 2006-2011, when she was in opposition). In common with the chief ministers of other states, her governments were subjected to very little democratic oversight through the legislative assembly, though the average of 44 days per year on which the Tamil Nadu Assembly met in the period 2009-14 was relatively frequent by comparison with some other states (the Haryana Assembly met on average for only eleven days a year over the same period). Jayalalithaa made extensive use of Rule 110 of the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly under which a minister, with the consent of the Speaker, can raise issues of public importance without subsequent discussion. In 2011-16, she made 181 such announcements, many of them about new schemes involving substantial public expenditure.

 

An authoritarian style was shown up, as well, in Jayalalithaa’s relations with business elites in Tamil Nadu.¹⁰ Though it is quite widely thought that, thanks to India’s pursuit of economic growth through the private sector, the power and influence of the corporate sector has increased to an extent that corporate interests can now shape political behaviour, this does not appear to be the case in Tamil Nadu. In the perception of many businessmen, the chief minister – at least in the period of the AIADMK government that assumed office in 2011 – far from being susceptible to influence, was actually ‘indifferent’ to business interests.

I interviewed a number of Tamil business leaders late in 2015, shortly after the Global Investors’ Meet that took place in Chennai in September of that year. The fact that the chief minister had attended the meet on two occasions was taken by some of those with whom I talked as a welcome sign of her renewal of interest in the business of the state. Till that time she had been inaccessible to businessmen from the corporate sector – and yet, all said, ‘nothing moves’ in Tamil Nadu without the backing of ‘the Leader’.

The CEO of one international company commented that ‘Tamil Nadu is in terrible shape’, and at about the same time that our discussion took place, an analysis of the ‘Ease of Doing Business’ across Indian states found Tamil Nadu in a lowly 12th place, after such states as Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh. In earlier governments, however, notably in her first government in 1991-96, Jayalalithaa had played a very important part – intervening personally to push a package of incentives – in bringing major investments by Ford and Hyundai to the state. These contributed greatly in turn to the development of the automotive industry that has made Tamil Nadu ‘the Detroit of India’.

 

Far from exercising influence over political action, therefore, big business in Tamil Nadu, under both AIADMK and DMK governments, has been subject to the unpredictable whims and dictates of the chief minister, exactly as Aseema Sinha reported from her interviews in the later 1990s.¹¹ Those with whom I spoke told stories of how Jayalalithaa had, in the recent past, obstructed significant investments in the state, including even that by the French tyre company, Michelin, which had concluded an agreement with the DMK government in 2009. She was held to have done far too little to prevent the closure of the Nokia plant – an event that boded ill for the reputation of Tamil Nadu as a state in which to do business.

Yet, it was also recognized that she had devoted her attention to the power supply problems of the state. The fact that Tamil Nadu had become a power surplus state was a notable achievement, largely the result of her personal engagement, as commentators observed following her death. Authoritarian rule in Tamil Nadu is double-edged. It can be very effective in getting things done for poor people as well as for business, or in making life extremely difficult both for people and for corporations.

 

A writer for The Mint argued, shortly before the state legislative assembly elections in 2016 that, ‘Conventional wisdom dictates that rampant populism, autocratic administrations and widespread corruption – all endemic to [the politics of Tamil Nadu] since MGR’s reign, with little to choose between the AIADMK and the M. Karunanidhi-headed DMK that have alternated terms since then – are antithetical to economic growth and human development.’ But, as the writer goes on to say, ‘in Tamil Nadu they have always coexisted comfortably.’¹²

How has this been possible? Populism in Tamil Nadu, reflected especially in government spending on the distribution of free consumer goods, or ‘freebies’, intended to garner votes, is generally considered to be in conflict with sustained economic growth, and corruption is thought to undermine effective governance. Yet, Tamil Nadu is clearly among the most successful of India’s major states, combining high growth performance with one of the best records in regard to social welfare and development.

The state seems indeed to be characterized by social democratic outcomes – a relatively good public health care system, relatively good state schools (though this is now disputed by reports on educational standards), and a universal and effectively implemented PDS. The radicalism of the Dravidian movement was always shallow – it eschewed communist leaders, and Dravidianists, including Periyar, never looked closely at the political-economic basis of caste. To have done so would have undermined many of their own leaders, and funders, who came from landed and merchant backgrounds.

But the Dravidian parties, drawing on the mytho-history of the region, have successfully built a broad basis of support among middle and lower castes/classes, and to maintain it they have been driven by the dictates of electoral competition to deliver in regard to social welfare. MGR put all his extraordinary personal authority behind the mid-day meal scheme; Jayalalithaa’s authority has ensured the relatively effective implementation of NREGA in Tamil Nadu, and of welfare programmes for groups of informal workers. The DMK, in its periods in office, has been constrained to follow up. At the same time both parties have worked with big business groups to secure economic growth, albeit not always with the consistency or in the ways in which business would have liked.

But this has taken place in a context in which, for all the vibrancy of electoral democracy in Tamil Nadu, reflected in generally high levels of participation, and the presence of a very active civil society, the governance of the state, as I have argued in this essay, can hardly be called democratic. The state shows up a combination of democracy and of authoritarianism – one in which authoritarian political leadership, in the context of an electoral democracy, enables some egalitarian ends, exactly as Kanchan Chandra has suggested can be the case. There are grounds, then, for arguing that the history of Tamil Nadu in the era of Jayalalithaa demonstrates the possibilities of democratic authoritarianism – democratic because of being subject to the mobilization of support in regular, freely contested elections.

 

Footnotes:

1. Accessible at www.timesofindia.indiatimes. com

2. Accessible at www.timesofindia.india times.com

3. Vaasanthi, Cut-Outs, Caste and Cine Stars: the World of Tamil Politics. Penguin Books, Delhi, 2006, p. 105.

4. Vaasanthi, ibid., p. 105.

5. Narendra Subramanian, Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India. OUP, Delhi, 1999, see footnote 90, p. 157.

6. Ingrid Widlund, Paths to Power and Patterns of Influence: the Dravidian Parties in South Indian Politics, PhD Thesis, Uppsala University, Part IV, ‘Transaction and Devotion in Tamil Politics’, 2000.

7. Vaasanthi, op. cit., 2006, p. 104.

8. Pamela Price, ‘Changing Meanings of Authority in Contemporary Rural India’, Qualitative Sociology 29(3), 2006, pp. 301-16.

9. Subramanian, op. cit., 1999, p. 299.

10. The following draws on my own article, with Andrew Wyatt, on business and politics in Tamil Nadu, forthcoming in a volume edited by Christophe Jaffrelot, Atul Kohli and Kanta Murali.

11. Aseema Sinha, The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2005.

12. ‘Why Tamil Nadu’s Freebie Culture Works’, Livemint, 12 May 2016, accessed at http://www.livemint.com