Last photograph of Jayalalithaa featuring Modi says a lot about Tamil Nadu’s future

They say a picture speaks a thousand words. And indeed, the much-circulated photograph of Prime Minister Narendra Modi consoling an inconsolable O Panneerselvam (OPS) as he weeps over J Jayalalithaa’s dead body, decorated with flower wreaths and quiet as the eerie calm that marked Chennai yesterday, flanked by Amma’s “closest aide” Sasikala Natarajan, also known as "Chinnamma", is one that might go down in history as the one that shaped it.

Tamil Nadu saw one of the swiftest transfer of power on Monday late night, December 5, 2016, when at around 11:30pm it was announced that Jaya had died. No later than the wee hours of Tuesday, December 6, between 12:30 and 1:30am, O Panneerselvam – forever Amma’s stand-in as the proxy chief minister – was sworn in as the late supremo’s successor, both as the CM of Tamil Nadu, and the chief of its legislature party.

The alacrity of action was praised by many as ample display of the brilliant training that Jayalalithaa had imparted to her juniors, whether bureaucrats or other ministers in her party. Moreover, the control and management of the crowd – a “sea of humanity” as it was rightly described by report after report, on TV and websites – was exemplary in ways that would have been unimaginable only days back, when fear of violence and riots breaking on out the streets and gullies of Tamil Nadu was widely anticipated.

Such was the cult of Amma and the spontaneous outpouring of powerful emotions that was ritually displayed, that what followed – unfathomable dignity and quiet fortitude of a deeply grieving state, that was truly betrothed to its leader – took most of us, the eager observers of history being centrifuged like never before in the last three decades in the southern state, by great surprise.

Yet, the “optics” of the state funeral, much of it natural and indicative of Jayalalithaa’s unwavering sway on her people, but some of it to carefully cultivate and further that very image, was a dead giveaway. The placement of the dramatis personae – some old hands, and some relatively new, while some comeback bishops and pawns – were seen taking steps and countersteps that only a shrewd observer of the rapidly unfolding politics would care to notice, wading through the thick smog of emotional theatre, some real, some for pure effect.

As the continuous broadcast of Amma’s last day on news channels reinforced once again that AIADMK was Jayalalithaa and Jayalalithaa was AIADMK, some of us began questioning – what now? It seemed impertinent at first, to even broach the subject, given every major political mover and shaker in the country – from PM Modi, to Rahul Gandhi, Arvind Kejriwal, and also the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, paid their respects and laid wreaths at Jaya’s feet.

But the theatre was already underway. As superstar Rajinikanth and a number of other southern demigods of cinema, came streaming by, as tweets and condolences, including from Ajith, Tamil actor Amma was close to, bracketed our multi-framed TV screens, Sasikala Natarajan’s immaculate presence – like a recently widowed woman, shorn of the centre of her heart, as it were – was unmissable. Commentators were quick to address the proximity of Sasikala to the one 29 years back, when MG Ramachandran, AIADMK’s founder and then CM of Tamil Nadu, as well as Jayalalithaa’s cinematic and political mentor, was lying dead and a visibly stilled Jayalalithaa, all wild hair and unkempt, was unmovable from the spot right next to his body.

Yesterday was a day when memory was shaken with photographs that resurfaced and archives that were pillaged for parallels. Parallels so strong and unnerving that they hung there with a portentous dare, teasing us to consider that the rupture that was Amma’s death might also sound the complete overhaul of Tamil Nadu politics, as far as its four-decade-old Dravidian dominance – the AIADMK versus DMK, the Jayalalithaa versus M Karunanidhi binary - was concerned.

The shock in the DMK was also evident in the poster they took out after Jaya’s death, mourning the loss of a worthy opponent. The cosy arrangement, even within the bitter rivalry between DMK and AIADMK, the midnight knocks and respective jail terms for Jaya and Karunanidhi, still operated within in a dual camaraderie of sharing the Tamil Nadu political horizon. The unstated but obvious pact was that they would, alternately, guard the gateways of the southern state’s deeply egalitarian, Periyar-brand of anti-Brahminical politics, would restrict the Hindutva-brand of political currency that had gained unbelievable dominance since 1992, when Babri Masjid was demolished in Ayodhya by BJP/RSS karsevaks.

The political alliances for electoral propping-up were always a sideshow, merely an additive in the game. This, despite Jayalalithaa’s “daintily picking up the porcelain” at Sonia Gandhi’s residence in 1999, backstabbing Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government at the Centre, or despite Amma’s “cordial” relations with PM Narendra Modi, even rooting for him as the BJP prime ministerial candidate in 2013, much before others saw the future.

That Jayalalithaa-led AIADMK in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls won 37 out of the total 39 seats in Tamil Nadu made her party only second to Congress at 44, and Amma a leader who could easily pitch for the top legislative job in the country in the years to come. But then she didn’t, overtly. In fact, the telling point of her going solo and really focussing on Tamil Nadu was when AIADMK decided to contest the Assembly polls alone in April/May 2016, without stitching up conciliatory alliances with either the BJP, that was busy courting her, or the Congress, whom she kept on tenterhooks, and yet won a landslide.

Jayalalithaa had steeled herself for her own state, and in a way, since her acquittal in the disproportionate assets case in 2015, had collected and dedicated herself to fortify Tamil Nadu’s welfare schemes. As Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze have explained in their book, An Uncertain Glory, Tamil Nadu’s welfare indicators in nutrition, female foeticide control, healthcare, education for the girl child, food security, public transport, subsidised telecom, housing and many other areas that are absolutely indispensable for a state as big as the one she presided over, far surpassed Gujarat’s. Yet, what is often not mentioned is that she didn’t eschew “business friendliness” for “populist schemes” – as is the usual grouse against her and her welfare brand of politics.

In an excellent piece, senior journalist Mihir Sharma explains how the four traits – authoritarianism, constitutional subregionalism, business-friendly approach and political welfarism – were first perfected by Jayalalithaa among the chief ministers, which were subsequently emulated by Bihar’s Nitish Kumar and may also be by then Gujarat CM, Narendra Modi, at least in the first three categories.

That BJP couldn’t have cut much ice, despite electoral arrangements, in Tamil Nadu has less to do with cold, hard math of electioneering, and more with the emotional and strong Dravidian politics of Tamil Nadu, and the memory of anti-Brahminincal movement leaders, who were atheists and didn’t believe in rituals that enforce/further caste apartheid. (Why Jayalalithaa was buried despite being a Tamil Iyenger Brahmin is exactly this.)

However, running a party and a government with an iron hand, and actively ensuring that there is no second rung of leaders to take the mantle forward or to prevent a coup, also means that in case of the unexpected parting – such as Jaya’s untimely death has been in this case – the vacuum too is equally big. And forces that had been hitherto shunned by the supreme leader – whether for their political untrustworthiness or for their lack of investment in the Dravidian core of welfare, woman-friendly politics – can now have a free run.

As Ramanathan S writes in a scathing piece in The News Minute today, Sasikala’s proximity with both the dead Jayalalithaa and the new Indian patriarch Narendra Modi, comforting all too conspicuously a shattered O Panneerselvam – now the Tamil Nadu CM, in real – means that this might as well be the beginning of the end of Tamil Nadu politics as we know it.

Sasikala’s family, which was ostracised by Jaya, and which she loathed, as Ramanathan aptly points out, was not only back, it was back in the helm. Ramanathan writes that Sasikala’s younger brother and husband were seen chatting with PM Modi, and the optics of the funeral, hidden in the sea of Tamil men and women and children mourning their Amma, could in fact be funereal for Amma’s legacy, as it were.

Of course, the negotiations to keep AIADMK alive and kicking – it has four and half years of tenure left – would be done in the name of Jayalalithaa and her amazing political contribution. But we need to ask how a muscular hypernationalist like Narendra Modi, and his close confidant and BJP national president Amit Shah, would reconcile themselves to both the grand political opportunity that a rudderless AIADMK now presents, as well as, the deeply feminine and feminist, the woman-centric reign that Tamil Nadu had got used to by now.

As journalist Dhanya Rajendran tweeted, there wasn’t a single incident or attempt at molestation or compromising a woman’s dignity in the ocean of people congregated to mourn Amma. She said it was her personal experience, but also mentioned those who didn’t disturb the sanctity of a woman fellow mourner were the followers of a departed woman leader.

Many electoral campaigns of the BJP, on the other hand, have been littered with gendered and violence, particularly at the caste and religious Other Woman. Yet Jayalalithaa, practically the Other Woman – being the Iyenger Brahmin among a retinue of Dravidian politcos and their testosterone-driven presence – had been the paragon of female empowerment, despite herself being sexually humiliated inside the Tamil Nadu assembly when she was only an MLA.

The last photograph of Modi with Jayalalithaa is therefore one for the times to come. It is throbbing with ominous currents, there’s the hint of deceit and a posthumous coup as it were, to transfer power truly and substantially from the Puratchi Thalaivi. It is exactly this the Chennai Superqueen had avoided all her political life: losing to it to patriarchy’s relentless chase and entrapment of the female warrior and ruler.