(The author is a Rajya Sabha MP and candidate for the seventh successive time from the Tamil Nadu constituency of Mayiladuturai)I was amazed to hear a well-known commentator describe the motley crowd the BJP has put forward for the Tamil Nadu Lok Sabha elections as a "formidable" combo. Formidable? Really?
Apart from the one seat that the BJP won in Kanyakumari back in 1999 (the winning candidate being the son of Kamaraj's right-hand man in the constituency) the BJP has not won once from this state. It has now brought on to its side Vijayakant's DMDK that won some 25 Assembly seats in alliance with Jayalalithaa's AIADMK in 2011 but has now lost about five of them to the AIADMK following the falling out between Jayalalithaa and Vijayakant that took place almost immediately after the state assembly elections were over. So much for alliances between film actors.
The DMDK loathes Dr. Ramadoss' PMK, a sentiment warmly reciprocated, despite both being in uneasy political wedlock with the BJP. The origins of the quarrel lie in the PMK leader's intense dislike of the domination of Tamil screen heroes and heroines in the state's politics. This led to his ordinance to PMK workers that they must eschew all cinema-going and badly hit the otherwise deep pockets of Vijayakant's fan club-turned-political party. The bad blood endures to the extent that Dr. Ramadoss failed to turn up at Rajnath Singh's stage-managed inauguration of an alliance that is fraying before it has quite been formed. Apart from personal dislike, there is also intense rivalry for the same political base in several of the northern constituencies of the state, including Salem, Kallakurichi and Villupuram. Also Puducherry. This rivalry has apparently been papered over with an alleged agreement brokered by the BJP President but is showing signs of wear and tear within a mere 24 hours of the papering over. Witness the street fight that has broken out between the PMK's initially declared candidate for Cuddalore and the newly anointed DMDK candidate. In Coimbatore, a battle royal has started between rival BJP aspirants, C.P. Radhakrishnan and GKS Selvakumar.
The fourth member of this odd quartet is Vaiko's MDMK. There was a time (oh! so long ago) when Vaiko thought his fiery, chauvinistic oratory would enable him to replace the ageing Karunanaidhi. However, Karunandhi has just celebrated his ninetieth birthday while Vaiko sinks further and further into oblivion, his utterly opportunistic politics now having landed this great champion of secularism in the lap of the RSS. How ineffective he is and how limited his influence was clearly demonstrated when, in the last Lok Sabha election, Manik Tagore of the Youth Congress, then not much over 30, took on the lion in his den and pulled out the lion's teeth. If Vaiko cannot win his own seat, how can he win theirs for his lesser mortals?
We thus have a party of no sitting Tamil Nadu MPs, merging with three Tamil Nadu parties of no MPs, each engaged in sawing the branch on which they sit. And this is the combo that has driven the hype that describes the BJP-brokered alliance as "formidable", marking the BJP's debut on the Tamil Nadu stage. Elementary maths would show that zero plus zero plus zero plus zero still equals zero!
What has further outraged those who on TV watched the BJP President reading (with great difficulty) the names of the combo's candidates, or saw the photograph on the front pages of newspapers next day, was that Rajnath had flung one dhoti-clad leg over the other and kept twiddling the soles of his well-shod feet at the eyes of the audience. In Tamil Nadu, this is just not done. You don't fling one leg over the other, certainly never in public, in a manner reminiscent of feudal lords showing the poor their place. The BJP President, in all his innocence of Tamil etiquette and propriety, only proved to his Tamil audience that he was what they had always suspected, a NNQLU (a Northerner Not Quite Like Us).
This is not a political alliance, just a bit of a nuisance that will probably not open its score and, if it does, not score above a run or two. It will, however, contribute to the fragmentation of the vote that is the striking feature of this election everywhere in the country but most of all in Tamil Nadu. It opens the way for even the Congress to show its still counts in the state, perhaps even for one of its candidates (ahem! ahem!) to steal a surprise win. Miracles are not unknown in politics.
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