Independent of the evolving politics and engaging protests, there is more to Tamil Nadu and the politics in the State than the 'Sri Lankan Tamil issue'. If anything, the politics and the protests have the potential to do more harm than good to the State and its people -and by possible extension, the cause of the Sri Lankan Tamils that the divided pan-Tamil, Dravidian polity has sought to espouse.
Overnight, political parties in the State have become undependable allies at the Centre. If the DMK partner from the State in the ruling UPA coalition at the Centre withdrew its Ministers and also the support to the Manmohan Singh Government, the party along with its then PMK and MDMK allies had pulled out of the BJP-NDA Government in December 2003, hastening early polls to Parliament. In its turn, the AIADMK, the rival of the party, did it to the BJP-NDA Government of Prime Minister Vajpayee early on in 1999, causing early parliamentary polls, but with years to spare.
That way, barring the Charan Singh Government, of which the AIADMK under actor-founder the late M G Ramachandran was a part, every time either of the two 'Dravidian parties' had been a partner in a national coalition, they had been seen as pressuring the Government at the Centre beyond a point -or, embarrassing the same while in power. This has had consequences as much for the party concerned as for the Government.
It had begun as early as the late Sixties when the Indira Gandhi Government, after the vertical split in the monolith Congress Party, thought of early dissolution of the Lok Sabha in 1971, if only to try and neutralise the pressures from the outside under-writer in the undivided DMK, apart from the CPI and CPM. Under Prime Minister V P Singh's National Front Government (1989-90), DMK pressured the Centre to pull out the IPKF from Sri Lanka. As Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, DMK's M Karunanidhi publicly boycotted the official reception for the IPKF at Chennai, charging it with 'genocide' and worse, against the Sri Lankan Tamils.
It's another matter that the successor Chandra Shekhar Government dismissed the DMK State Government for what he told Parliament 'for anti-national act'. Not very long after came the 'Rajiv Gandhi assassination'. Thankfully for the party, the DMK was not in power but that did not save the party from the ignominy of its worst electoral results since its inception in 1949 and entering the poll fray in 1957.
The 'Rajiv Gandhi assassination' came to hound the Government at the Centre, and the DMK in particular, when the Congress under the late Sitaram Kesri overnight pulled out of the Deve Gowda-led United Front Government at the Centre, based on the Jain Commission Report. Earlier during the P V Narasimha Rao-led Congress Government after the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, the ruling AIADMK ally from and in Tamil Nadu, would pressure the Centre until the latter found parliamentary solace in the Ajit Singh-led Lok Dal of the time.
Facing the 'Dravidian music'
It boils down to the Dravidian majors from Tamil Nadu becoming an undependable partner at the national-level, independent of whoever is the partner and whichever coalition is in power at the Centre. Be it a Congress, BJP or a Third Front combine ruling the Centre, they all have faced the 'Dravidian music' at a time of the latter's choosing.
Considering the possibilities of neither alliance in the State being able to continue with the 'victor-takes-all' dictum of traditional voting pattern in Tamil Nadu, and
internal claims and posturing by individual parties within each combine nearer home, the chances are that both the DMK and the AIADMK would have fewer seats to call their own, for being able to bargain for power and pelf at the Centre as much as they have got used to in the past.
Overnight regional parties from Tamil Nadu, given their numbers and also their longer history of existence and electoral alliances at the national-level than any comparable one from other parts of the country -the National Conference and the Akali Dal have relatively lesser stake in terms of parliamentary seats - have become undependable partners at Delhi, all the same. Living memory has it that the leader of the ruling coalition would have to keep leaders in waiting for rushing to Chennai to placate their existing Dravidian allies, at times on issues that may have nothing to do with official policies and programmes.
It is also not as if the 'Sri Lankan issue' could be a game-changer in the emerging electoral politics in the State, other than possibly 'orphaning' the Congress, and eliminating all chances of a return of 'national parties' to the south Indian State in any big was in the foreseeable future. Contesting the panchayat polls in the State on its own in October 2011, the Congress polled around 6.5 per cent. It was slightly more than the 4.5 per cent vote-share that the party had registered while contesting alone in the parliamentary polls of 1998, but then the breakaway Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC), now non-existent, had taken away with it another five or six per cent of traditional Congress supporters' with it.
The figure thus added up to around half of the 20 per cent that the Congress had polled in the post-MGR Assembly polls of 1989, but less than half of the 42 per cent vote-share that it had bagged in 1967, when it lost power to the DMK. In comparison, the BJP as the 'party with a difference' even for the 'Dravidian' Tamil Nadu of 1988-89 could be calculated to have brought in 6-8 per cent additional vote-share to the NDA that it had headed at the time -the AIADMK under present-day Chief Minister Jayalalithaa in 1998 and the DMK parent in 1999. It shrunk to the traditional 1.5 per cent when the BJP contested the 2001 Assembly polls of 2006 on its own, and has remained there.
Sri Lanka as a poll issue
The undecided 'swing voters' decide the fate of polls in Tamil Nadu now also, as they have been doing since the exit of MGR in the 1989 Assembly polls. At the height of the 'Eelam War IV' in May 2009, the 'Sri Lankan issue' did not have any great influence on the Tamil Nadu electorate. Suffice is to point out that despite the heavy campaigning against the ruling Congress and DMK partners in the UPA at the Centre and in the State, they recorded decent victories, all the same. Pan-Tamil MDMK leader Vaiko, for instance, lost to a political novice in a Congress nominee -and by a substantial margin.
Today, though the DMK seems hoping to win back the perceived loss electoral ground of the 'Sri Lankan issue', with its withdrawal from the Manmohan Singh Government and still expecting the votes to come his way, that need not be the case. With MDMK's Vaiko and 'Naam Thanizhar Katchi' actor-founder Seeman espousing the peripheral pan-Tamil cause louder still, any electoral constituency based on the issue is theirs and none else. So have the new-generation student-protestors distanced themselves from all political parties in general and the DMK in particular.
Independent of the issues on hand, political parties may be judged by what is in store for them on the legal front in the coming days, to a greater or lesser extent. The Congress, as the relatively stronger among the national parties, seem to be suffering from inevitable anti-incumbency fatigue at the Centre, with a host of pending court cases and a general sense of lack of direction. The DMK has the '2-G scam case' verdict from the trial court pending. Chief Minister Jayalalithaa is facing the 'wealth case' from her first stint in office (1991-96), still pending before a Special Court in Bengaluru, with directions from the Supreme Court long ago, for expeditious disposal.
'Progressive State' and progress
Traditionally, Tamil Nadu has been in the forefront of 'progressive States' in the country. For historic reasons, dating back to the advent of British rule in India that commenced in a region which did not have a strong ruler(s) to call its own, much of present-day Tamil Nadu came under the control of the East India Company, through a stroke of a pen in the hands of the Nawab of Arcot. With it also came modern education, healthcare and employment opportunities, simultaneously triggering the 'rationalist movement' for social equity and equality, called by different names at different times in the 20th century.
The State was thus ready to absorb and distribute the benefits of 'democratic socialism' as a national policy in the decades after Independence. Yet, when 'economic reforms' came India's way, once again Tamil Nadu was in the forefront of (relative) modernisation of higher education and in the creation of employment through big-time private sector participation. Today, Tamil Nadu has 570 engineering colleges, turning out 265,000 graduates each year -higher than what many developed nations put together have been able to achieve.
The number of management graduates that institutions in Tamil Nadu turn out is also comparable. So is it in terms of other skilled sectors of education and employment qualification. In context, they all discharge the kind of jobs that is expected of them, though in terms of higher quality and research-orientation, much needs to be done in the coming years and decades.
In this background, frequent public protests can unnerve the FDI investors, for whom political stability and a sense of security (as different from actual security that is anyway felt in the State) are pointers to the future. As coincidence would have it, Tamil Nadu has faced at least four major public protests in the past year. Beginning with the 'Koodamkulam anti-nuclear protests', to those by the Muslim groups first against the US over the documentary,
'Innocence of Muslims' and later against the Tamil feature film,
'Vishwaroopam', the anti-Sri Lanka protests have been the most prominent with greater participation.
Each of these protests have had a cause and justification, each more compelling and immediate than the other as for as the target constituency was concerned. The presence of new-generation youth, particularly students and from both genders, in these protests has added a new dimension. The current phase of anti-Sri Lanka protests have also drawn techies, both students and the employed, thus adding a new dimension to what corporate might be looking at as 'discipline issues' of the future.
The 'anti-Hindi agitation' of the mid-Sixties created such a mood in the State, which was later compounded by all-India protests by Government employees, Railways staff, and in bank and insurance companies, all in the public sector at the time. It all came to a sudden halt only with the promulgation of Emergency in June 1975, and even offered a vicarious justification for the latter, which was anything but that.
Today, Tamil Nadu, more than anyone else, needs investments, industries and job opportunities, if only to stall its descent as among the most industrialised and investor-friendly States in the country. The continued power-cuts all across the State, dating back to a few years now and under both the DMK and AIADMK Governments, is already a dampener for investments. The fact that no Government in the State has been able to remedy the situation, whatever the reason, has a strong message of its own.
Considering that anti-Sri Lanka protests had marked the innings of DMK Chief Minister M Karunanidhi's fifth term in office (2006-2011), coinciding with the 'Eelam War-IV' in Sri Lanka, a restless youth, and an unending stream of protests, could only present a picture of lawlessness that the State does not deserve, now or ever. Time used to be when the Tamil Nadu youth of the 'anti-Hindi agitation' era were considered suspects in the job-market elsewhere in the country, their situation saved only by the general sense of labour unrest across the country at the time.
Today, when the rest of the country is fast catching up on traditionally progressive States as investment destination, the image projected by protests of whatever kind in the national media (and not just the English media), which is also viewed across the world oftentimes, it could be saying a lot more -more so, when the present-day student protestors on the Sri Lanka issue, for instance, are leaderless and clueless and could retire into ideological shells with little or no understanding of how the world outside functions, and why.
If none else, the 'Sri Lanka protests' are refusing to die down after the 'Geneva vote', as soon as might have been expected. Its recall at the UNHRC over the next two rounds, in September and March would fall ahead of the Hambantota Commonwealth Summit in Sri Lanka, and parliamentary polls in India, even if the latter is not advanced. There is however a silver-lining, in the form of the promised Provincial Council polls in Sri Lanka's Tamil-majority North. There is also speculation that the Indian polls could be advanced.
New Delhi could come under pressure all over again, with the political parties and protesting students and others in Tamil Nadu pressuring the Centre to act 'more decisively'. Demands are being aired for India boycotting the Summit. Others could follow, for New Delhi initiating a 'harsher' UNHRC resolution than the present US-sponsored motion.
Clearly, the inspiration and inputs for the protestors come not from Sri Lankan Tamils in Sri Lanka, but from their Diaspora groups whose linkages to the LTTE are discernible. Some INGOs and international media are also out there, wanting to use Tamil Nadu as their battle-ground to pressure India into deliver one broadside after another, at neighbouring Sri Lanka. Thankfully, there has not been much of violence thus far on the streets of Tamil Nadu, but one missed step, or miscued police reaction, and it could have consequences -contributing to escalation that the perpetrators on the ground now may not have in mind, at least when they have begun!
(The writer is a Senior Fellow at Observer Research Foundation)
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
PREV
