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VIEWPOINT: FIFTH COLUMN
Successive Failures
If the Karunanidhis are unable to provide governance,
there will be more Jayalalithas
By Tavleen Singh
So the Fat
Lady is back. I was in another country when she swept back to power in
Tamil Nadu and so missed most of the national outrage over her return.
Where I was, the newspapers were more interested in the Monkey Man so
he got many column inches and Dr JJ only a paragraph. It is, after all,
an Indian problem and with corruption infusing the very air Indians breathe
it appears to be hard for the rest of the world to understand why there
should be so much fuss over a person convicted of corruption occupying
public office.
It is, of course, not going to be very nice
for Tamil Nadu. The leitmotif of her last regime was hubris. On a terrifying
scale. I can tell you of a private school that lost one of its properties
because thugs close to the chief minister fancied it. I can tell you of
inconvenient bureaucrats who were publicly humiliated and inconvenient
journalists who met even worse fates. But what good would it do? It seems
clear that to the ordinary Tamil voter Jayalalitha was no worse than Karunanidhi
either in her arrogance or her abilities to govern. Perhaps they remember
vaguely the wedding of her foster son and its gaudy excesses. Perhaps
they remember the diamonds her friend Sasikala sported on her ample person,
the enormous stashes of jewellery that were found among Jayalalitha's
assets afterwards, the shoes, the clothes, the vast properties, the unaccounted
for wealth. Perhaps they do not care because they sense that she is no
worse than the rest.
 What
the average voter does care about is governance. The sort of governance
that would make a real difference to his life, and clearly Karunanidhi
was unable to provide this. In rural Tamil Nadu there is desperate poverty
and it's mainly because of bad policies and uncaring governments. Allow
me an example. I remember travelling with P. Chidambaram in his constituency
Sivaganga when he was finance minister and meeting an old lady who fell
at his feet in one of the villages. In distraught tones she pleaded with
him in Tamil. It turned out that all she was asking for was an old age
pension of Rs 100 a month, provisions for which existed under some misguided
Central Government scheme. She had been abandoned, she said, by her children
and eked out an existence by selling garlands so the Rs 100 would really
make a difference.
Now, stop a minute and think of the stupidity
of a pension scheme that ends up putting such a paltry amount in the hands
of the needy. Crores of rupees of taxpayers' money go into funding it,
lakhs of rupees go into administering it and all it does is keep poverty
alive. If, instead, the village was connected by a proper road and a decent
public transport system to the nearest town the old lady and millions
of others like her could go into town to sell her garlands and could one
day be empowered to lift herself above what economists call the poverty
line.
This, alas, has not been the Indian way of governance.
In the name of the poor we have nurtured poverty by providing charity
through expensive, unwieldy schemes instead of giving people the tools
of empowerment. To change this our political leaders need to start thinking
in newer, more modern ways and there is no sign that any of them have
even begun to understand this. Why blame Karunanidhi for the return of
the Fat Lady when the prime minister is paving the way for the Thin Lady
to take over from him by ruling in the same convoluted, hopeless way as
Karunanidhi did in Tamil Nadu. Atal Bihari Vajpayee has been prime minister
long enough now to show us whether he is capable of governance. And he
has shown us that he is not.
He is, sadly, just a tired, old man surrounded
by other tired old men who appear to venerate the Congress method of governance.
So, when the next general election comes the average voter is going to
search for an alternative and when he does he could well turn to Sonia
Gandhi. It's fine for you and me-and certainly me-to worry about the humiliation
of being ruled by a little, Italian housewife. But the fact that Signora
poses a serious challenge to one of our most seasoned political leaders
speaks for itself and very badly indeed for Vajpayee. It means that the
average Indian voter has lost faith in the ability of political leaders
to govern. So why not an apolitical housewife for prime minister, why
not a corrupt film actress for chief minister of Tamil Nadu?
Meanwhile, we political pundits worry about
loftier things. About anomalies in the law, falling standards in public
life and other such higher ideals. If someone convicted of corruption
could not be a candidate for electoral office should she have been allowed
to campaign? Should she have been sworn in as chief minister? The ground
realities are that she did campaign, she has become chief minister and
the people of Tamil Nadu could not care less.
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