Chennai Corner

A Pyrrhic Victory
As far as the BJP is concerned, it is still status quo after the Speaker’s ruling that Azhagiri can read the reply to a question in English (during Question Hour in Parliament) and after that his deputy, Shrikant Jena, will take over. In April this year, BJP leader Sushma Swaraj had led the attack on Azhagiri saying, “We haven’t seen Azhagiri for a year. He is perpetually absent from Parliament. And as far our knowledge goes he also does not attend Cabinet meetings. We want to know where Azhagiri is.” Now she will know but will she hear him beyond his reading of a written reply? Azhagiri might think he has got his way, but it’s going to be a Pyrrhic victory. Because the BJP was not only trying to embarrass him for not showing up but also for not knowing enough about his portfolio. And as part of the Group of Ministers appointed by the PM on the Bhopal Gas tragedy (meetings he attended even at the cost of his presence at the Tamil conference in Coimbatore recently), the opposition is going to be asking sharp questions. Now, the BJP will be able to embarrass him in person and Jena will probably look superior which should do no harm to Dayanidhi Maran’s rumoured ambition to take over Azhagiri’s portfolio.

Although it needs to be said that while there is no love lost between Azhagiri and Maran (they reportedly had a spat in May last in Delhi when the DMK was trying to appropriate six cabinet berths), the chances of the two are not very high. After all, Maran has come in from the cold just 18 months ago after Stalin (and sister Selvi who is married to Maran’s uncle) lobbied with father, CM Karunanidhi. It’s unlikely he’ll jeorpardize his equation with his granduncle by taking on Azhagiri. While Karunanidhi seemed to prefer Stalin as his heir, Azhagiri’s brand of charming the electorate should come in handy when assembly polls come around. And nobody can do it like he does.

Achtung, Amma!
Azhagiri has already been roped in to paralyse amma by peppering her constituency, Andipatti, with lavish schemes. He spelt out his agenda clearly at the medical camp he inaugurated in the constituency this week saying it was not just another event in Andipatti but “the beginning of the AIADMK’s downfall.” Adds DMK Theni district secretary L Mookaiah, “With its MLA always inaccessible, the people of backward Andipatti feel neglected. Hence, we fill the vacuum with welfare measures.” Counters Rajan Chellappa, an AIADMK functionary, bravely, “It is true that the DMK is deliberately singling out Andipatti. But that will not cut ice with the electorate who are loyal to Amma. The Tiruchi meeting (on August 24) will be a grand success,” says senior AIADMK functionary Rajan Chellappa.

But if the electorate in Andipatti – who have been staunch AIADMK supporters for decades – are anything like Chennai-based Murthy, who drives his spanking new autorickshaw that was made possible by the government’s loan to 10,000 auto drivers (in the first phase), then amma should have big worries ahead. Murthy’s take: “All these years I voted for the Congress, but after this auto, which I got without paying a bribe and which is not hypothecated to a “seth” (usually Marwari) I will be voting for the Kalaignar hereafter.”

Incidentally the camp was organized by the Apollo Hospitals and Aravind Eye hospital in Madurai. Even if Karunanidhi’s birthday was on June 3, the camp was got up on July 18 to celebrate it – talk of a figleaf of an excuse to buy people’s favour. And while the camp was initially supposed to cover 8,300 persons, ultimately 15,000 benefitted.

One thing that Azhagiri said that was true was that Jayalalitha never raised the problems of her constituents in the assembly. How could she when she chooses to keep away when not in power? Azhagiri also said: “She is a leader who visits her own party headquarters only in between her trips to Kodanadu estate in the Nilgiris.” That’s the perception in TN. She’s going to pay big time for parking herself at Kodanadu for long spells because every opposition leader is going to leverage her long absences from the scene of activity. But after just one massive rally in Coimbatore, she has got CM Karunanidhi in a tizzy. So Azhagiri’s prediction that “the AIADMK will vanish from Tamil Nadu after 2011 assembly elections,” seems more like wishful thinking.

Congress, the eligible groom
One of the signs that Karunanidhi is losing sleep is his caution to the Congress that it should beware of Jaya. In Coimbatore, she made sure she blamed the DMK for everything and the Congress for nothing. The next election will be won by the Dravidian party that gets its arithmetic right. Which is why Amma is being gentle towards the Congress although she had ripped Congress President Sonia Gandhi to shreds sometime ago and driven the Congress towards the DMK. She began the wooing of the Congress (remember she said Indira Gandhi was like a mother to her?) at the Lok Sabha election last year and she’s still at it. She’s even brought up Karunanidhi’s insults to Indira Gandhi and Kamaraj in the past.

In Delhi, Rahul Gandhi (who has come to the state twice over the past year but gave Karunanidhi a miss on both occasions) is very focused on strengthening the Congress by 2014, when he is expected to take a stab at the top job. So he’s been meeting up with youth Congress office bearers from TN. The newly-elected Youth Congress president M Yuvraj says about the other “Yuvraj” (Mayawati’s label for the Gandhi scion), “Rahul is keen to expand the Congress base in the state before the general elections. He has asked us to focus mainly on problems of the people at the panchayat level and to interact with them constantly.”

And that’s why Karunanidhi can no longer be sanguine that the Congress is in his corner. All his other allies (the left, chiefly) have deserted him. The PMK will join forces with the winning combination as always although Ramadoss better get ready to eat humble pie by the truckload.

Fakes flourish
Some months ago it was the fake medicine scam. Currently, the police is unravelling a fake mark- sheet scam in which at least 48 students are believed to have altered their mark-sheets after asking for a re-evaluation. The modus operandi was that even parents forked over money to the scamsters so their children could have the requisite marks to get admitted to the engineering college of their choice. Karunanidhi made haste and surprised everyone last Sunday by turning up at the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA 2010) single window counselling at Anna University. This was a first for him, but when elections are coming around, politicians have to go the extra mile. 

“As long as gullible people are around, fraudsters will be active. Therefore, the gullible must guard themselves,” Karunanidhi said. But after police discovered a fake police station and even a fake court where a gang targeted innocent victims looking for legal redressal for a fat fee, of course, Jayalalitha decided to offer an opinion: “One family is making fools of us all,” she observed. There are many who would say her close aide Sasikala Natarajan (whose nephew Venkatesh has just been divested of the charge of being big boss in a few districts) also made fools of the people in TN. Jayalalitha herself is fighting several cases of corruption.

Admission related scams, incidentally, keep happening in Anna University. In 2002-03, nearly 6,000 students submitted suspicious-looking SC/ST certificates, and the following year, 500 students misused the NRI quota. 

Considering all these “genuine” scams, the government has found time to target an upright officer, C Umashankar, who as additional collector of Madurai back in 1985, unearthed a scam in the construction of cremation sheds in graveyards under the Jawahar Rozgar Yogana. His efforts to make government processes transparent, has bought him trouble. Ironically, he has been suspended because his caste certificate looks like a forgery. Fakes have been floating around universities for years, but nothing, needless to say, has been done. Apart, of course, from making right noises.