Income tax raids at AIADMK icon J Jayalalithaa’s Poes Garden residence had all the trappings of a Friday blockbuster. The late night reality show began just past 10 pm and ended at 1.45 am. There was action, dollops of emotion, some tear-jerking moments, pathos, climax and a good versus bad message. But surprise was the biggest element in the unfolding drama, as Jaya’s house was seen as a temple by the cadre of the Dravidian party and her room the ‘sanctum sanctorum’.
A handful of cadre staged a spirited protest before they were bundled into police vans. Jaya’s niece almost broke down while putting up her own little show outside Poes Garden demanding the right of entry, claiming she was Jaya’s legal heir.
Halfway through the show though, the ‘bad’ was clearly defined as jailed party leader V K Sasikala. The Garden raid happened only because it was Sasikala’s residence for over three decades. IT officers went nowhere near the former chief minister’s chamber; they only combed the rooms used by Sasikala and Jaya’s personal secretary S Poongundran. The climax came when they seized a laptop, six pen drives and a tablet, which the raiding party said had full documentation on the maze of shell companies owned and operated by Sasikala’s relatives, associates and benamis to hide their black money stash.
This was the second-ever raid on the house called Veda Nilayam and the first in 20 years. The last time it was searched was when Jaya was just out of power in 1996. Conducted by the vigilance department, it went on for six days and covered Jaya’s premises and business establishments. Last Friday’s show too was the sixth day of staggered searches, this time by the Income Tax Department; the first five days were from November 9 to 13 when the mother of all raids happened in 187 places tied to the Sasikala clan. Initial estimates pointed to the seizure of undisclosed wealth amounting to `1,430 crore apart from diamonds, jewellery,
Swiss watches and wads of currency. Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami shared the pain of the cadre over the Garden raid, indicating the place venerated as a temple had been defiled by the Sasikala gang though he did not specifically name her. For his part, deposed AIADMK joint general secretary TTV Dhinakaran saw in it a betrayal of Jaya’s atma by the ruling clique.
Curiously, instead of supporting the swoop, most Opposition parties echoed DMK working president M K Stalin, who called the raids political vendetta and questioned the outcome of the earlier searches on State health minister C Vijaya Basker before the rescinded RK Nagar by-elections. What IT officials had found at that point were documents suggesting the spending of a staggering `89 crore to influence voters at RK Nagar, where Dhinakaran had selected himself as the official AIADMK candidate. Even if Basker was the conduit, Dhinakaran was the alleged moneybag.
It was Dhinakaran’s ability at rustling up such huge amounts of unaccounted cash besides trying to bribe an Election Commission of India official through a conman in an alleged `50 crore deal through hawala channels that got the taxman sniffing for the stash. Indeed, money was the clan’s biggest calling card. The current series of raids are actually work in progress to fix the fattest cat in Tamil Nadu.
Dhinakaran like current vice president Venkaiah Naidu is known for his catchy one-liners. Through one such statement the rebel leader almost gave the game away when he defended the clan’s amassing of wealth, saying, “I am not Gandhi’s grandson, nor are others.”
As it is Sasikala and her sister-in-law Ilavarasi are serving time in Bengaluru’s Parappana Agrahara central jail. Despite the fabled networking skills of Sasikala’s husband M Natarajan, the Madras High Court upheld his conviction in a 1994 luxury car import case, though he managed to pull strings to allegedly jump the liver-kidney transplant queue when he was battling for life in a Chennai hospital.
The conviction of two other members of the clan, S R Baskaran and his wife Sreedhaladevi, to five- and three-year rigorous imprisonment respectively in a 1997 disproportionate assets case too was upheld by the high court. And the Damocles’ sword of the EC bribery case keeps dangling over Dhinakaran.
That makes it six. The trail of shell companies would only add to the list of clan members in big trouble. For starters, Sasikala’s brother Dhivakaran could face serious problems as huge stash was allegedly found in hostels of colleges run by him.
No wonder, Ilavarasi’s son Vivek Jayaraman and daughter Krishna Priya made the politically correct statement of saying they saw no vendetta in the searches. They will have to do much more to get out of the woods.
Suresh Sundaram
Deputy Resident Editor, Tamil Nadu
Email: ssuresh@newindianexpress.com