Last week, Chennai had its hottest March day in six years with the Meenambakkam station recording 39.2 degrees Celsius, 4.5 degrees higher than normal. It could be tempting to succumb to the cliché that the campaign to the 18 Assembly and 39 Lok Sabha seats in the state is similarly heating up, but the fact is otherwise. Blame it on the rollercoaster ride of Tamil Nadu politics over the past two years, or the deaths of late DMK chief M Karunanidhi and AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa, but this poll season is practically boring.
Mind you, there have been some developments. Political rhetoric, for instance, has hit a new low. Observers will note that since AIADMK founder M G Ramachandran’s departure from the DMK, political attacks have often been charged, with Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi having made particularly vitriolic attacks against each other. However, the current campaign attacks are shocking in their crudeness. The leaders of both Dravidian parties, born of lofty values of social justice, have called one another liars, useless, good for nothing, murderers and worse. Both have interesting things to say in their manifestos but their speeches rarely reflect that. Perhaps, they hope to shock the voters to make up for the absence of the charismatic leaders, but it is a downward spiral: What happens when you hit the bottom?
The demise of two clever, witty, persuasive politicians has also ripped a veil of cynicism to some extent. In the past, regardless of how much they were believed, politicians constructed a facade or rationale to justify their decisions. Consider, for instance, the national coalition of parties coming together against the BJP. Some of them, opponents at the state level, claim to be coming together for a larger cause. In Tamil Nadu, parties are not even trying this. For instance, Anbumani Ramadoss of the PMK, to justify his party’s alliance with the AIADMK after attacking the ruling party for months, said, “We tried everything. We went it alone in polls. Everyone appreciated us, but we didn’t get votes.” Senior AIADMK leader Thambi Durai, for long a critic of the BJP, similarly explained the alliance between the two parties as “not an alliance of ideology, but an alliance to win.” The honesty is practically refreshing.
Meanwhile, cash-for-votes has again entered the spotlight. DMK treasurer Durai Murugan’s residence in Vellore was raided last week and over Rs 11 crore found on the premises of a party functionary close to him. Close to Rs 2 crore was found packed in the doors of a vehicle in which a VCK functionary was travelling and, and close to Rs 4 crore was found “unclaimed” on a government bus.
However, cash-for-votes has become so common that it almost seems quaint how shocked everyone was 10 years ago when the DMK perfected what is now known as the ‘Thirumangalam formula’ in the bypolls to the constituency by that name. Over Rs 100 crore was seized by the Election Commission during the 2016 Assembly elections. In 2017, T T V Dhinakaran, the AIADMK rebel who started the Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam, is alleged to have taken voter bribery to a whole new level in the bypoll to RK Nagar. Close to 10 days before the polls this year, the EC has seized well over Rs 100 crore. But the people of
Tamil Nadu are so accustomed to voter bribing that actor-politician Kamal Haasan’s campaign speeches assuring that his Makkal Needhi Maiam eschews the practices are sometimes greeted by silence.
For their part, voters who received cash are divided on whether it binds them to vote for that party. Many appear to be of the view that cash distributed by politicians at poll time is simply public money being returned to the public, more so given the sub-par performance of most politicians once they are elected.
In fact, the views of voters in Sivaganga, as expressed to this newspaper, were reminiscent of Kamal’s famous dialogue from Nayagan: “Avangala nirutha sollu, naan niruthuren. Tell them to stop (being corrupt), we will stop (taking their money).”