[Now in her third term as chief minister, she
is at the blazing height of her popularity; her party, the All India Anna
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, won a remarkable 37 of the state’s 39 parliamentary
seats in spring elections. Last week, most people in Chennai expressed serene
confidence that she could maintain political control, even if it meant running
the state from a jail cell. Her lieutenants, whether out of love or fear, were
jockeying to prove their fealty. Her voters were passionate in her defense,
saying the verdict was driven by a political vendetta.]
By Ellen Barry
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Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu,
was sentenced
to four years in prison. Credit Dibyangshu
Sarkar/Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
|
CHENNAI,
India — Rarely have tears of despair flowed so copiously at a
swearing-in ceremony as they did last week, when officials in the southern
Indian state of Tamil Nadu prepared to govern without Jayalalithaa Jayaram, an
iron-fisted leader known as Amma, or Mother, who has been sentenced to four
years in prison on corruption charges.
After taking the podium, the man who will
replace Ms. Jayaram as the chief minister of Tamil Nadu pulled a photograph of
her out of his shirt pocket,bowed reverently and began to weep. (“Soaked hankie takes the
brunt,” read a headline in The Telegraph the next day.) The housing
and urban development minister was sobbing so uncontrollably that her oath was
barely audible. The minister of handlooms and textiles was said to have
“wailed.”
If this sounds melodramatic, that is a matter
of perspective. On the day the verdict was read, a 58-year-old
electrician named Venkateshan walked out of the shop where he had been watching
the news coverage all morning, soaked himself with gasoline and set himself on
fire, shouting, “My Amma has failed in the court,” according to the police
inspector who investigated the death.
Huge posters have appeared on the streets
showing Ms. Jayaram’s face and the image of a broken chain, with the words,
“How can a human being punish a god?”
In a country that has long tolerated brazen
corruption in its regional leaders, Ms. Jayaram’s conviction will stand as a
benchmark. Despite her wealth, power and friendship with Prime Minister
Narendra Modi, she has become the first sitting state leader to come under a
new, tough Supreme Court ruling that bars her from remaining in office while
appealing a conviction, as officials here have done for decades. And she is
barred from running for office for 10 years, bad news for a woman of 66.
Now in her third term as chief minister, she
is at the blazing height of her popularity; her party, the All India Anna
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, won a remarkable 37 of the state’s 39 parliamentary
seats in spring elections. Last week, most people in Chennai expressed serene
confidence that she could maintain political control, even if it meant running
the state from a jail cell. Her lieutenants, whether out of love or fear, were
jockeying to prove their fealty. Her voters were passionate in her defense,
saying the verdict was driven by a political vendetta.
“They are panicked,” said A. S. Panneerselvan,
the reader’s editor for The Hindu, a daily newspaper based in Chennai, the
capital of Tamil Nadu. “Behind the bravado is actually a very, very hopeless
reality that they don’t know what their next step is going to be. This is
something they were not mentally prepared for. The reality is that your
electoral fortunes are different from your legal fortunes.”
That Ms. Jayaram enriched herself in office
should not come as a complete surprise.
In 1995, during a period when she professed to
earn a salary of 1 rupee per month, she staged an opulent waterfront wedding
for her foster son that included 40,000 guests and a formal sit-down dinner for
12,800, according to court documents. An imperious leader, she terrified her
underlings, who, during her early days in office, would regularly stretch
facedown on the ground and touch her feet. Multistory images of her face were
erected throughout the state capital; an American diplomat, in a cable published
by WikiLeaks, recalled one that was captioned “Amma is God.”
Subramanian Swamy, a onetime confidant who
went on to file the corruption charges against Ms. Jayaram, said she seemed to
be compensating for brutal treatment that she suffered as a teenage girl,
thrust into working as a film actress in Kollywood, Tamil Nadu’s homegrown film
industry.
“Suddenly everything was at her command, and
she went berserk,” he said. “She really thought she was going to be the queen
of India.”
Mr. Swamy, then the leader of the Janata
Party, filed a case against his former friend in 1996, after she lost a bid to
serve a second term. He alleged that, after coming to power with little wealth,
she had illegally accumulated 660 million rupees, or about $10 million, during
her first term, funneling large sums of money through a series of shell
companies. A search of her home at the time found that she possessed more than
10,000 saris and some 66 pounds of gold, matter-of-factly itemized under
headings such as “one gold waist belt studded with 2,389 diamonds, 18 emeralds
and nine rubies weighing 2.3 pounds.”
But the case inched its way forward through a
blizzard of delays and motions. After winning election a second time, Ms.
Jayaram returned as chief minister in 2002. In the decision released on Sept.
27, Judge John Michael Cunha noted that after she regained her office, the
accused recalled 76 prosecution witnesses, and that “64 of them casually,
without any rhyme or reason, backtracked from their earlier version,” including
a high-ranking police official, a development he called “amazing and shocking.”
A turning point came in 2003, when India’s
Supreme Court granted prosecutors a change of venue to neighboring Karnataka
State, something Ms. Jayaram’s political rivals had pursued. Mr. Cunha
concluded his 1,136-page ruling with a quotation from former Vice President Al
Gore, that “if political and economic freedoms have been siblings in the
history of liberty, it is incestuous coupling of wealth and power that poses
the deadliest threat to democracy.”
“Heady mix of power and wealth is the bottom
line of this case,” the judge wrote.
The verdict, which included a fine of $16
million, clearly came as a jolt to the party faithful. After the flamboyance of
her first term, Ms. Jayaram had become more careful, and for all her
imperiousness, Tamil Nadu is a well-run state. The poor have benefited greatly
from a flotilla of public welfare programs she has introduced: Nutritious meals
are available for a few pennies at “Amma canteens,” subsidized medications at
“Amma pharmacies,” to say nothing of “Amma salt,” “Amma water,” “Amma cinema”
and “Amma cement.”
Lakshmi Shrika, 40, lived next door to the
electrician who self-immolated, and she shook her head in bafflement when asked
about his act. She, too, has a soft spot for the jailed leader, whom she called
“a very bold female.” Under Ms. Shrika’s table was one of the party’s famous
freebies: a new food processor emblazoned with Ms. Jayaram’s face.
Still, she said that she had been shocked by
the reaction of her mother’s friends, whom she overheard saying that the judge
and his family should be killed.
“They are so angry, so aggressive,” she said.
“Older people, they have taken it to their heart. They are more devoted.”
It was hard to say how many people had
committed suicide over Ms. Jayaram’s conviction; by the middle of the week,
officials from her party had a list of 37, but the circumstances were
impossible to independently confirm. Some officials seemed to be counting heart
attacks. After the death of the party’s founder, the matinee idol Marudhur
Gopalan Ramachandran, dozens of suicides were reported; skeptics in Chennai
said that the party incentivized such acts with payments to surviving family
members.
The Times of India
reported the self-immolation on Thursday of a 23-year-old woman
in a village in the southern part of the state who doused herself with gasoline
after putting her baby daughters to sleep. She was in serious condition, with
burns on 60 percent of her body. Family members told the newspaper that she had
spoken of little but the verdict since Saturday.
On Wednesday, a group of followers lighted
candles and chanted over Mr. Ramachandran’s grave, which overlooks the Bay of
Bengal, and a thin, gray-haired woman beat on her breast with her fists.
“Today, our madam is in jail,” said their leader, a lawyer named N. Nevalinathan.
“We ask our god to help us overturn all obstacles.”
In an interview after the ceremony, he called
Ms. Jayaram “a living god.” He said he could fully understand why her admirers
might consider suicide.
“You see, they do it for love, because of
affection,” he said. “If there is ever a situation in which the mother is gone,
all of her children are left in the road.”
Hari
Kumar contributed reporting.
