The cult of Amma: Why Jayalalithaa is so beloved

The announcement came at midnight, confirming what most of Tamil Nadu had known since afternoon — the chief minister J Jayalalithaa, addressed and referred to by her epithet "Amma" since the turn of the millennium, had passed away.

We knew it when parents began to receive messages that schools would be closing early. We knew it when offices sent their employees home at 3pm. The roads were choked by 4pm Greams Road — in which Apollo Hospital, where she has been wrestling with death for 73 days, stands — was cordoned off.

By 6pm., the heart of the city was deathly still, except for the sirens of patrol vehicles and the occasional barks of dogs. Not even a breeze rustles through the trees, as I write this, an hour after Jayalalithaa’s death was announced, and one can hear one’s own heartbeat.

The overwhelming emotion across the city, and state, is not so much surprise, not even apprehension, as sorrow.

Jayalalithaa’s life has ended on the tragic note that has underscored much of her success — months after she made history by becoming the first incumbent since her mentor MG Ramachandran (MGR) to win an election, she lost a battle in which she seemed set to triumph. The “new lease of life” for which she had credited the prayers of her supporters had been snatched away.

The oscillation on the status of her health continued to the end. On Sunday night, Apollo Hospitals began to tweet live updates, for the first time since she was admitted in the Intensive Care Unit on the night of September 22-23. On the day the hospital said Jayalalithaa would be going home, she had a cardiac arrest.

In its most ominous announcement yet, the hospital had tweeted, “Despite our best efforts, our beloved CM remains in a grave situation.” Sangita Reddy, joint managing director of Apollo, deleted the tweet after posting it.

Panic broke.

People began to rush home before the streets went up in flames.

Tamil news channels flashed the news that Jayalalithaa had passed away, and then retracted it. The flag at the AIADMK headquarters flew at half mast, but was raised again.

The announcement that no one in the state wanted to hear, with the possible exception of the political rivals that her party had annihilated, had all but been made.

We knew the official statement would come in the wee hours of the night, once everyone was home safe. That is the way Tamil Nadu operates.

The city did not burn.

It came to a standstill.

Supporters who have travelled long distances with minimal luggage bundled into sarees and cloth bags, are flocking to the chief minister’s residence on Poes Gardens. Her body will be kept at Rajaji Hall for people to pay their respects. Three days of mourning have been declared.

#WATCH: #Jayalalithaa's mortal remains being taken from her residence Poes Garden to Rajaji Hall in Chennai (Tamil Nadu) pic.twitter.com/qYmCmcuPjV

— ANI (@ANI_news) December 6, 2016

The fact that there is silence rather than chaos sums up Amma’s rule. Despite a first term that was riddled with political errors, Jayalalithaa morphed into a beloved leader who managed to maintain cordial relationships across party lines at the Centre; despite the charges of corruption against her, the people of the state knew they could trust her to pull them out of a mess. And that was why, despite the many failures on the part of the state government in providing relief during the floods of 2015, its people voted her into power yet again.

It was easy to forgive even her most grievous — even callous — abuses of power, things which cannot be termed “errors”, because despite her aloofness, Jayalalithaa carried an aspect of vulnerability.

She appeared steadily more approachable, even as she terminated all interaction with the media. And despite her ready smiles and increasingly benign mien, she radiated strength.

Most of us remember Jayalalithaa’s first term in office, 1991-96, as a nightmare. Rumours were rife about the chief minister scouting for prime property to which the government would lay claim, on her helicopter rides. Land owners were petrified. Traffic was stalled for hours on end every time her convoy left her home.

Whispers of money laundering among her close associates, relatives of her friend and advisor Sasikala, seemed to be confirmed by a lavish wedding for which all the rooms in all the luxury hotels in the city were booked, a 75,000-square foot pandal was erected, and the state’s security forces deployed across a two-kilometre-long arterial stretch along which the wedding procession would pass.

The estimated cost of the wedding, of Sasikala’s nephew (and Jayalalithaa’s foster son) to actor Sivaji Ganesan’s granddaughter, was reportedly over Rs 5 crore in 1995. This was exclusive of clothes and jewellery.

Yet, on December 5, 2016, there are few people who can say they don’t feel the hollowness of grief.

Journalists often grumbled about Jayalalithaa’s propensity for filing defamation cases and her refusal not only to speak to the media herself, but also to permit open dialogue from official sources. Fearing retribution, most people in positions of authority would ask to remain anonymous, detracting from the reliability of a news report.

But the story was different with the public. Women felt safer with Jayalalithaa as chief minister. We knew the police would not take crime against women lightly.

The air of dignity and authority that wound itself around Jayalalithaa was reassuring. The people of Tamil Nadu knew, even if reluctantly, that this period of governance was a good one.

As for her supporters, the cult of devotion to Jayalalithaa is without precedent, with the possible exception of that of MGR.

In the wake of MGR’s illness and eventual death, there were hundreds of attempts at self-immolation. In Jayalalithaa’s case, several of her party workers are reported to have died from shock alone. Several others have attempted or committed suicide.

But that is par for the course.

"Loyalty" is not quite the right word to describe the emotion that spurs Jayalalithaa’s supporters to abase and debase themselves so constantly as to be contemptuously called her sycophants rather than ministers, her acolytes rather than supporters.

Her deputy chief minister, who has now taken oath as her successor, O Panneerselvam once famously said that his initial was not "O", but "Zero", because that was all he was by comparison to Jayalalithaa. When a Supreme Court order forced her out of office in 2001, he kept her slippers by his side, in the manner of Bharata in The Ramayana. A meeting he held during the initial weeks of her hospitalisation in 2016 was chaired by her portrait.

Party workers have cut off their tongues, pierced various parts of their bodies, dragged chariots, and committed suicide as some sort of offering to pray for her success in the elections over the last quarter of a century.

Jayalalithaa’s comeback from her rout in 1996 is nothing short of miraculous. She was defeated so soundly in that election that no one expected a return; she lost her own constituency to a near unknown.

But Jayalalithaa has always had the odds stacked against her, and always overcome them. In a state whose Dravida parties’ philosophy has been guided by atheism, anti-Brahminism, and patriarchy — the only other woman chief minister the state has had in nearly a century is MGR’s widow Janaki, who was in power for less than a month — Jayalalithaa, a Brahmin woman who was notoriously superstitious managed to ascend to the highest seat of power four times. 

Jayalalithaa has been in the public eye since she was 16, when she starred in her first film Vennira Aadai. She played a woman who loses her sanity after witnessing the death of her husband, and her stirring performance was universally acclaimed.

Her climactic speech has the typically regressive clichés that were the norm of the time, but the mature dignity of her stance and soliloquy belies her age. It is a story often told that she was not permitted to watch her own debut in the theatre since she was a minor and the film had an adult rating.

She quickly became one of the biggest stars of the day. She often said she had wanted to become a doctor, and her financial circumstances had forced her into a more lucrative career. But it was a career at which she excelled.

Veteran theatre directors have praised her ability to improvise on stage when fellow actors departed from the script. Her looks and dancing prowess complemented her thespian skills.

Her stardom was accelerated by MGR, who propelled her to cinematic and eventually political success. In an early interview to journalist Rabi Bernard, Jayalalithaa called MGR her “annai, thanthai, guru, deivam (mother, father, teacher, and god)”; she recounted an incident that first drew them together.

During a shoot, she said, her family had decided to drop in, in numbers. Hearing them shout out to her, an annoyed MGR appeared on the scene and demanded who had been calling for “Ammu”, and who “Ammu” was. A young Jayalalithaa rushed to apologise and told him it was her pet name. MGR smiled enigmatically in response and left without a word, she said in the interview. She later learnt that “Ammu” was his late wife Sadhanandhavathi’s nickname.

It was MGR who took her under his wing in politics. He made her propaganda secretary of the ADMK (later AIADMK), the breakaway faction he founded after his fallout with Karunanidhi led him to leave the DMK. She was intelligent, articulate, and fluent in several languages.

These attributes would help her forge a bond with the populace and rebuild the political career that seemed to have ended in 1996.

Her surprise win in 2001 heralded the beginning of a very different kind of rule. The air of entitlement and grandeur was gone. She was no longer “JJ” or “Jaya” — her epithet “Puratchi Thalaivi” (Leader of the Revolution) began to give way to “Amma”.

The spinster without a family had become a maternal figure. Jayalalithaa had found the one role that would allow a woman to be worshipped by people of all genders, castes, and ages.

The firebrand had turned into a benevolent, beneficent icon.

Jayalalithaa’s oratory skills struck a chord. She could humble herself without compromising on her bearing; she deferred to the people while remaining a figure of authority; she appeared remorseful for her excesses while never apologising or confessing to faults.

She was astute, and never lost track of the pulse of the people.

The traffic blockades became a thing of the past. There was minimal disturbance when her convoy passed. She sat by the driver’s side and waved through the windows at passersby.

The freebies were carefully thought out. The focus was on food, shelter, and education. Grinders, laptops, and grains were distributed either free of cost or at subsidised prices.

She came up with innovative ways to tackle female foeticide and infanticide such as the cradle baby scheme, under which people were encouraged to put up newborns that they could not raise or did not want, for adoption.

A defeat in 2006 — largely blamed on government ineptitude in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami — was followed by a resounding victory in 2011 and a historical one in 2016.

This time round, Jayalalithaa’s future seemed secure. “Amma” had become a brand, quite literally. The Amma canteens, Amma vegetable markets, Amma mineral water and proposed Amma theatres were a hit. They saw her come back to power months after large parts of the state were devastated by floods.

For the first time in nearly four decades, a chief minister had remained in power. Rather than spend a couple of years undoing or renaming the schemes the previous government had put in place, she was empowered to see her own ideas through.

Twenty years ago, Rajinikanth had famously said, “Even God can’t save Tamil Nadu if you vote for Jayalalithaa.”

The situation is drastically different now. People are terrified of what lies in store for Tamil Nadu now that the woman who was set to lead the state for the next four years is no more.

Even though she has always polarised opinion, and there are those who will vehemently shake their heads in disagreement with the idea of Jayalalithaa as saviour, the mandate proves that that was how most of the state saw her.

And it had more to do with her capabilities and her intellect than with her image — she was successful not because of shrewdness, but because of brilliance. Everyone who has worked with her, on even the most minor projects, has testified to the attention she pays to detail.

She read every document of every proposal she had to approve. She asked the right questions. She kept herself informed. Her success cannot be attributed to propaganda; it has come her way despite her mishandling of the media at a time when few politicians can afford to antagonise the press.

Her will often got in her way. But there was something awe-inspiring about her refusal to bow down, to be cowed down. And she became a hero for snubbing a particularly abrasive interviewer on national television. Where others broke down or were caught on the wrong foot, she held her own.

She has left behind a city and state paralysed by the idea that someone who seemed incapable of being vanquished has been claimed by death.

The silence in the streets is more frightening than the violence that raged through them in 1987.

Also read: Absence of a successor to Jayalalithaa is worrying