View: Tamil assertion a must for politics, not stardom

Amma is no more. Karunanidhi is well past 90 and no longer a part of the daily grind of politics. Tamil Nadu politics is ready for a churn. Actors Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth have thrown their hats into the ring. Will a second MGR emerge from the debris of fallen cut-outs of yesterday’s political heroes, to capture the imagination of the Tamils and lead one of India’s most dynamic states? Absolutely not.

True, Tamil politics is in flux. Rebel AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakaran’s stunning victory in Amma’s erstwhile constituency, in the recent by-election to fill her vacancy, has unsettled the comfortable bipolarity between the AIADMK and the DMK. The DMK candidate lost his deposit. Now, while DMK certainly did not campaign hard, knowing that a Dhinakaran victory would trigger an exodus of rebels from the ruling faction and lead to the collapse of the government and fresh elections, failing to get even one-sixth the polled votes is not a sign of a government-inwaiting.

The official AIADMK of Palaniswami and Panneerselvam has been left tottering, and blaming the blatant money power displayed by the Dhinakaran camp in the RK Nagar by-election. In a culture in which all parties spend a lot of money to bribe voters, money power is anything but avice that draws popular ire. DMK leader Stalin lacks the spark that marks out a leader: he reads out prepared speeches and lacks the wit and linguistic vigour of his father, Karunanidhi. He has put would-be challengers from within the family under control, for the time being, but that is about the best that can be said in his favour: the core 20% or so votes that the DMK can always count on are not enough to secure victory without additional support.


In such listlessness, why shouldn’t a hero, Kamal Haasan, and an antihero, Rajinikanth, have a fair chance at becoming leaders? The kind of fan frenzy that could seamlessly spill over from the silver screen to the political dais is a thing of the past: Vijayakanth thought he had a good thing going, but that actor-turnedpolitician fizzled out fairly fast.

To see why Rajinikanth’s ageing fans and supporters of Kamal Haasan are likely to have to be content with a single digit share of the vote, look at the Tamil youth that mobilised themselves in defence of their culture when it seemed to be under assault from supercilious, ignorant north Indians. Yes, we are referring to the Jallikattu protests.

This form of bull wrestling, which threatens more harm to the human participants than to the bulls, whose job is to prove their virility in the struggle and thus win the right to be the stud bulls for the region, earning big money for their owners, goes back to nearly two millennia before the present. Breeders lavish money on their prize bulls and would brook no cruelty to their valued possessions. Banning the sport in the name of preventing animal cruelty seemed like a joke and an insult to the Tamils. Tamil Nadu can possibly secede from India if forced to choose between continuity of haloed Tamil culture and being part of the Indian Republic.

Families packed meals for their daughters to eat at protest sites where they camped day and night, instead of worrying about any threat to their tender morals amidst teeming crowds of young people who created spontaneous leaders, communicated via social media, maintained discipline and civility and posed an existential threat to the political elite of the day who got pushed to the margins.

Yet that mobilisation and those leaders disappeared after the Jallikattu protests were over. Their latent potential persists and make two things clear. Any leader who rides on support from a north Indian party will find himself hobbled fairly fast.

Two, Tamil imagination has evolved significantly from the time when a swashbuckling MGR could get away with his claim to be champion of the poor, and will reject facile claims to leadership by ageing greenhorns in politics. An articulate, insouciant Dhinakaran has a better chance than an actor deigning in slow-motion to come to the rescue of the stranded Tamil Nation. An even better welcome awaits Mr or Ms X, if he or she can tap into the vein of Tamil selfassertion that coursed through the Jallikattu mobilisation.