Kazhagam Of Appeals

On Sunday morning, April 4, two days before Tamil Nadu voted, DMK chief M.K. Stalin appeared on a well-publicised TV show­— Stalin Seivaraa (Will Stalin Deliver?) on Sun TV, which is owned by his cousin Kalanithi Maran. The well-choreographed show saw Stalin answering questions from an audience of youngsters and students—aimed at presenting Stalin as a leader who vibes well with the youth.

The questions ranged from NEET, corruption, DMK’s poor track record on law and order, his party’s opposition to the BJP and if he missed his father Karunanidhi. Asked about the movies he liked to watch, he named Rajinikanth, Vijay and Ajith—all top Tamil heroes—as his favourites, obviously with an eye on the votes of their fans. The show ended with Stalin wiping away tears as he recalled the legal battle he had to wage to get a burial spot for his father next to DMK founder Anna’s memorial on Chennai’s Marina beach.

The programme showcased Stalin, 68,  as a leader ready with a solution for every problem, tolerant of criticism about DMK’s past record, prepared to be tough on corruption and infractions by his own partymen in future and a doting family man who loved to spend weekends with his grandkids. “We have seen planted questions during a press meet, but here an entire Q&A session was planted,” jokes a senior journalist.

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That half-hour performance capped a series of carefully crafted public outreach programmes—Stalin addressed gram sabhas, collected petitions and delivered hectic speeches from atop a campaign van. The DMK has been a past master at using mass media like print and television; this summer it occupied the digital space as well. There was no escaping Stalin’s smiling face or his seven-point agenda to make Tamil Nadu great again as you peeped into your smartphone. Prashant Kishore’s I-Pac, engaged by the DMK apparently for Rs 350 crore, packaged and pushed Stalin relentlessly into the Tamil psyche for months.

“The number of times you saw Stalin on digital space depended on your own choice of websites and reports that you read on Tamil Nadu elections. Since this was the most discussed TN election after social media became all pervasive, any topic viewed or discussed on the polls would automatically throw up DMK’s digital ads. The same applied to AIADMK ads too, since everything worked on the algorithm of Google ads,” discloses a member of the I-Pac team.

The success of the DMK’s campaign could be gauged by its theme song—Stalin thaan varaaru, vidiyal thara poraru (Stalin is coming to provide the dawn)—notching over five crore views on YouTube. The AIADMK showcased its own achievements with an equally catchy number, Thodarattum Vetrinadai, Endredum Irattai Ilai (Let the victory march of TN continue with support for two leaves). Soon, the campaign songs were countered by their parodies from the opposite camp, sparking a tit-for-tat between the two Dravidian majors. “The two campaigns showcased the underlying creativity.… The AIADMK videos had better production values,” observes K. Srinivasan, a PR consultant.

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Both sides had recourse to tactics to disparage the adversary. One DMK ad showed two leaders bending with folded hands in front of another seated on a throne-like chair—a hint at the alleged subservience of the AIADMK government to the Modi government. The AIADMK retorted by videos of ‘public’ snubbing of DMK campaigners by reca­lling massive power cuts, land grabbing and violence during the DMK rule, asking people why they should return to those dark ages. They would add: “When everything is going smoo­thly under Edappadiar why should we change?”

The DMK festooned the front page of newspapers with cartoons that had exag­gerated claims of NEET for kindergarten  students and a prestigious library being converted into a cow welfare centre. The AIADMK riposte used real headlines from the past, detailing DMK excesses and corruption packaged as front pages of local dailies under their respective mastheads. Only an alert reader would read them as advertisements, a fact men­­tioned in small print in a corner. Shaken by this deliberate act of misdire­ction, N. Ram, former chairman of The Hindu expre­ssed his dismay in an interview to the BBC that his own newspapers—English and Tamil—had fallen into this trap.  

In this virulent exchange over print, TV and digital media, the big losers were the traditional platform speakers engaged by the two Dravidian majors. The DMK, which has 400 platform speakers on its rolls and used to deploy them across the state to make belligerent speeches during election campaigns, left it to local candidates to use the services of these devoted party faithfuls.

“Earlier, people used to call me weeks in advance to book me for meetings in other districts, but this time only local candidates from Erode and nearby areas called me. When our leaders’ speeches can be seen on mobile phones, interest in speakers like us has dwindled. Our main job is to keep the aud­ience engaged till top leaders arrive at the venue,” said Erode Iraivan, a well-known platform speaker of the DMK.

Another famous DMK speaker, Salem Govindan, resorted to donning the garb of a soothsayer. “I tried this get up during the RK Nagar byelection in 2017 and it attracted voters, who stood and heard what I had to say. I use this met­hod to convey the DMK’s many promises, the failures of the AIADMK government and a few lines about conserving water and avoiding plastic,” he says.

DMK candidates also feel that engaging local speakers for grassroots connect is more effective as they know civic problems of a specific area and would highlight them on their campaigning rounds in autorickshaws fitted with speakers. “I spent more time in autorickshaw campaigns than on public meetings this time,” recalls Iraivan, who gets paid by the local party functionary. Speakers like him used to earn at least Rs 15,000 a month before the polls, but the pandemic-induced lockdown saw them confined to their homes. Both the DMK and AIADMK supported their enlisted platform speakers with a monthly allowance of Rs10,000 over the past one year before the elections. But the short campaign window after candidates are finalised has also proved to be a dampener for the speakers.

This assembly campaign might have sparked the transition of the Dravidian parties’ dependence from the rhetoric of leaders and speakers, delivered in person, to the more instant communication offered by TV and digital media. “Our leaders still have to lead from the front as they lend credibility to our campaign; they need to convince voters with their speeches. While speeches tend to bec­ome repetitive, innovations offered by digital media will become more attractive to younger voters in the future,” predicts a member of the AIADMK’s poll team. If that transpires, platform speakers may find themselves reduced to the footnotes of election history.

By G.C. Shekhar in Chennai