TIRUCHY : You might have heard him, probably not seen him. During election season, his voice will find you. No matter in which part of Tamil Nadu you live. Meet the ‘auto speaker’, the nondescript party worker who goes around in autos or cars fitted with speakers, canvassing votes for their leaders. Not much is known about these unseen campaigners. Express spoke to a few and found out that many of them have the same story. Though they come with big dreams of a political career, just a few of them graduate to become platform or street corner speakers. Going beyond that is unheard of.
Take the case of S Jayasankar. The 47-year-old farmer has been a speaker since 1990. This time, he is canvassing for the AIADMK. He is also the party’s branch secretary in Uthirakkudi, Ariyalur. Though not educated, Jayashankar understands branding.
“The key is to emphasise the two-leaves symbol. It has magical powers to attract votes. So we keep saying stuff like ‘the symbol gifted by MGR, the symbol retrieved by Jayalalithaa’ so that people relate to it.” Jayasankar says that kids, who run behind campaign vehicles, keep repeating these ‘punch lines’ that they heard during the announcements.
AIADMK platform speaker ‘Theeppori’ Ramalingam, who began his political career as an auto speaker, says it’s an art. “We need to know the social composition of the village we are in, and issues that matter to people there. For instance, if I see a large group of women standing, I would focus on schemes that impacted them. I would say lines like, ‘Thalikku Thangam Kodutha Chinnam, Ilavasa Aadu Kodutha Chinnam’, harping on the social welfare schemes, to attract them,” says Ramalingam.
DMK member ‘Thayir’ Karunamurthy, who is currently campaigning for Congress candidate S Thirunavukkarasu in Tiruchy, says he used to read Murasoli every day, since he was a child, which helped him become an auto speaker. “I used to sell curd and that’s how I earned the prefix Thayir. I am a class-6 dropout. But because I read papers, I could recite important speeches of Karunanidhi.”
Karunamurthy runs a small firm called ‘Karuna Publicity’ in Tiruchy, which does recordings and voice overs for advertisements. “I also work as a supervisor in a hotel. I have taken a month leave now. I make just `500 a day doing this, but I do it for my self satisfaction,” he says.