In May, no bookie would have put money on an understated Southern politician becoming India’s most progressive leader. The true soul of politics is economics, not populism. MK Stalin, the scrupulously polite, attentive but independent-minded Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, by virtue of his recent decision to appoint the world’s most capable economists to revive his state’s economy, could give the whole of India what it dearly needs today—progressive economic leadership with global inclusivity. The essence of successful management is to gather people with divergent views, tune out the white noise and cull out the best of advice. This requires absolute self-confidence, which MKS has shown.
The DMK’s gestalt is Dravidian nationalism, but its outlook is now international. Its Finance Minister Palanivel Thiagarajan is an MIT graduate and former corporate banker—and horror of horrors to cowbelt demagogues—even married to an American! His grandfather was the Chief Minister of Madras Presidency in 1936. Casuists and bellicose ignoramuses ignore the difference between dynasty and pedigree, the latter of which the reform-minded finance minister has in spades.
As Thiagarajan said, there is no single solution for the problems of a diverse country like ours. The ideology of Stalin’s council of economic experts is as varied as India—Nobel laureate Esther Duflo, Raghuram Rajan, Arvind Subramanian, Jean Dreze and S Narayan. Their kind is abhorred and distrusted by the Modi ecosystem, not being great fans of the protectionist, DeMo, “ancient-India-had-airlines” theories. Leveraging the power of the Hindi heartland brute majority, the Northernisation of Indian decision-making has over time sidelined nationally significant Southern politicians. J Jayalalithaa, another Southern leader with the foresight, administrative efficiency and political astuteness to equal any Indian prime minister, never got the chance.
The first and only time South India had powerful stakeholders in modern Indian history was during the freedom movement. There was the great poet Subramania Bharati who sang the ballads of freedom. Sarojini Naidu, known as India’s nightingale before Lata Mangeshkar. The second Rashtrapati Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Titans like C Rajagopalachari and K Kamaraj.
And the greatest of them all, the fiercely independent scholar and intellectual Sir CP Ramaswamy Iyer who envisaged South India as a loose cooperative federation with a common economic agenda who was bullied by Patel and Nehru into submission. The greatest disservice the Gandhi dynasty did to India was to demolish its Southern leaders like Kamaraj, Rajagopalachari, S Nijalingappa and GK Moopanar. Indira Gandhi crushed Devaraj Urs, RK Hegde and KP Unnikrishnan—all Congressmen.
Rajiv Gandhi dismissed the NTR government. In the end, the Gandhis had consiglieres like K Karunakaran as the Southern faces of governance with little or no national role. Nearly all Southern CMs are forced to say uncle because North-dominated governments are the fiduciaries of the economy.
In the end, it took an anti-Gandhi South Indian premier PV Narasimha Rao, who teamed up with the Sikh Manmohan Singh, to pull India out of the humiliating, debt-ridden, gold-selling quicksand it was committing suicide in.
The hour of despair produces the man. With Stalin has arrived the hope of a real political alternative capable of ruling Delhi, around whom the little big egos of other Opposition leaders must band together. Perhaps, Stalin and Thiagarajan would be the new Rao-Manmohan team that is desperately needed now. That is an Aatmanirbhar Bharat we can be proud of.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com
ALSO WATCH | How Mumbai, India's most crowded city, beat the odds, and the coronavirus