As my trip to UP drew to a close, I put this point about the relationship between rising election costs and the need for ever-greater quantities of black money to a high-ranking civil servant, whom I met one evening at a party. We were standing in the garden of a large home belonging to another government official in Gorakhpur, the eastern city in which Sahara’s Subrata Roy began his career. A squalid, beat-up place, roughly 270 kilometers east of Lucknow, Gorakhpur was notorious even in UP for its toxic mixture of poverty, criminality, and violence. Yet all that seemed far off as we stood on a warm, pleasant evening, gossiping in the garden about the ongoing elections and swatting away mosquitoes.
Modi’s notebandi experiment had actually cut the quantity of black money sloshing around during that year’s poll, the civil servant told me. But he recognized the wider problem: spending on elections had risen sharply over the last decade, and without action it was likely to keep rising in the future. Still, he frowned when I asked if money power was an especially pronounced issue in his state. “We have our problems here, but you have to remember UP is a poor place, and Gorakhpur is very poor,” he replied, looking vaguely offended. Corruption scandals in northern India tended to involve criminals stealing money from state welfare programs designed to help the poor, he explained. But because the state itself had relatively very large, wealthy businesses able to donate large sums, election spending was actually quite restrained compared to other parts of the country. “If you want to see really clever cronyism,” he said with a smile, “you have to go to the south.”
CHAPTER 7
CRONYISM GOES SOUTH
The Cult of Amma
I walked up a quiet tree-lined avenue in Chennai one spring morning in 2014, to visit a personality cult. Ahead stood an elegant white three-story building, its entrance draped with flags. The place had a colonial feel, with Greek-style columns and a balcony on the first floor. Curvy script announced it as the headquarters of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, or AIADMK, one of two parties that had dominated politics in the southern state of Tamil Nadu for a generation or more. A small gold statue in the forecourt showed its male founder, wearing a hat and thick glasses and holding his arm aloft in a victory sign. But his image was dwarfed by the party’s modern icon: Jayaram Jayalalithaa, a diminutive but powerful woman, whose unsmiling face stared down from four giant billboards, one of which stood almost as tall as the building itself.
The commercial capital of the south, Chennai had a different vibe from the rest of urban India. It was still a megacity, with seven million people and steamy, fetid weather, but the pace was slower than in Mumbai or New Delhi, with a downtown of hushed streets and low-rise buildings, rather than half-finished glass towers. The local elite viewed themselves differently too: a people who rose early, spent frugally, and venerated pursuits of the mind, from calculus to “Carnatic” classical music. Many still referred wistfully to Madras, as the city had been christened by the British. (The name changed to Chennai in the mid-1990s to honor Damal Chennappa Nayagar, a local ruler from the time before the East India Company arrived in 1639.) Yet these restrained habits only made Jayalalithaa’s cult-like status seem odder, as if they somehow left the place more vulnerable to demagoguery, and the peculiar southern variant of crony capitalism that went along with it.
Both autocrat and recluse, Jayalalithaa by then almost never appeared in public. But in Chennai she was inescapable, staring out from thousands of brightly colored posters that decorated road junctions, bus stops and highway flyovers. Dozens more were pasted to the walls of her party headquarters. Street stalls outside hawked memorabilia to party loyalists: gilt-framed Jayalalithaa pictures, Jayalalithaa postcards, even garish Jayalalithaa rugs and throws. A former Tamil-language movie star, she had been strikingly beautiful in her youth, and some images showed her from that period, gazing coquettishly at the camera. There were a few more contemporary pictures of her smiling too, looking off into the middle distance and resting her hand on her chin. But mostly she appeared in the same austere depiction, showing an older woman dressed in a conservative sari, her face jowly and pale, with a red bindi on her forehead and her long dark hair drawn back modestly in a bun.
To her acolytes Jayalalithaa was known only as “Amma”—“mother” in Tamil—a moniker that now adorned a bewildering array of public institutions and commercial ventures. Many dozens of Amma cafes dotted the streets of Chennai, where workers could buy a heavily subsidized breakfast of idli, a savory rice cake, or pongal, a kind of porridge made of rice and yellow lentils, for just a single rupee. Elsewhere, Amma stalls sold cut-price vegetables, while the chief minister’s face stared out from bottles of Amma drinking water and bags of Amma cement. A madcap exercise in political brand extension, her image eventually adorned everything from cut-price pharmacies and cinemas to salt and tea. Out in the villages, where her party drew much of its support, her face was if anything even more prominent. From the brazenness of her populism to the ubiquity of her face, Jayalalithaa would have made many a Middle Eastern dictator blush.
This intense focus on image was born partly of Tamil Nadu’s passion for movies. Bookish and clever as a child, Jayalalithaa was persuaded to try filmmaking by her widowed mother, herself a former actor. Jayalalithaa’s first break came in her teens when she met Marudur Gopalan Ramachandran, or “MGR,” the most celebrated Tamil actor of the age and the man depicted in gold outside the party’s headquarters in Chennai. The duo became costars, then lovers, and then power brokers, as she followed him into politics during a moment of fierce conflict over caste identity.
Beginning in the 1950s, a local party called the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam—meaning Dravidian Progress Federation, or DMK for short—launched a movement to improve the treatment of Tamils from lower castes, while at the same time attacking the disproportionate power held by upper-caste Brahmins. When it first took power in 1967, the DMK began expunging Brahmins from the state’s political life. Once a loyal party member, MGR launched the AIADMK as a rebel offshoot twenty years later, eventually becoming chief minister in 1977. As his companion and political lieutenant, Jayalalithaa inherited the party after his death in 1987, although only after a fierce public battle with his widow. Over the next three decades Jayalalithaa then waged a further back-and-forth struggle with the DMK, a party whose leader also happened to have a background in the movie business.1 “Tamil Nadu has the unique distinction of having been ruled for nearly fifty years by a screenwriter and two actors, all masters of their craft,”2 as one biography put it.
During her five spells as chief minister, Jayalalithaa pioneered an imaginative new kind of populism. Assuming that voters cared little for ideology, many Indian politicians learned to win voters’ affections through handouts and freebies, in a process sometimes known as “competitive populism.”3 Come election time this often meant pledges to cancel farmers’ bank loans or provide eye-catching sops to the poor. But Jayalalithaa was more inventive. In 2011, she pledged to give nearly seven million laptops to schoolchildren across Tamil Nadu at a cost of $2 billion or more, handing them out in rucksacks decorated with images of her own face.4 Other giveaways focused on female voters, giving away Amma-branded electric mixers and food grinders, or targeting farmers with free seeds, sheep, and goats.
These bonanzas were mocked for their brazenness, as was Jayalalithaa’s periodic habit of taking out full-page national newspaper advertisements to boast about her own largesse. But as a political strategy it was undeniably successful. Jayalalithaa took power first in 1991; by 2014 she was midway through her fourth spell as chief minister and unquestionably Tamil Nadu’s dominant political force. She grew more imperious as her time in office lengthened, almost never talking to journalists or giving speeches. Her supporters also acquired a reputation for vindictiveness, as even minor critics were harangued in court or assaulted in the streets. A former civil servant turned potential political rival had acid thr
own on her face.5 Jayalalithaa became especially notorious for filling her party with an all-male cast of toadies and supplicants. Some showed loyalty to their leader by prostrating themselves in her presence; others had tattoos of her face inked into their forearms.
All important decisions in the state were said to be taken by Jayalalithaa herself, along with many that were much more trivial. No one could speak for her, but given that she herself rarely spoke in public, the state often seemed stuck in perpetual confusion about her intentions. One of her few confidants was Cho Ramaswamy, an elderly cultural impresario with a background as an actor and screenwriter. At the time we met in 2014, he ran a low-budget satirical newspaper akin to a Tamil version of Private Eye or The Onion. “She is a determined leader, someone not afraid,” he told me one afternoon, sitting in the paper’s chaotic downtown office, where the smell of incense hung in the air. “Sadly, it has become a habit with her party men,” he added with a hint of embarrassment. “They are very submissive, very obsequious.”
Trying to learn more, I went to see a man named Pandiarajan, a business leader and state legislator, who was said to maintain a modicum of independent judgment. He had defected from the DMK not long ago and thrown his lot in with Jayalalithaa, although most people seemed to think that his previous loyalty to her rivals meant she would never truly trust him. Still, if anyone could provide some insight into the intrigues of Amma’s inner court, various friends told me, it would be him. We met in his office, where he kept a large picture of Jayalalithaa on his desk and another on the wall.
Pandiarajan was the founder of a successful recruitment consultancy, and at first we chatted amiably enough about business. But his tone changed when I broached the topic of his leader, and he began to treat me to a loyal discourse on Jayalalithaa’s many fine characteristics: her unbending focus on development; her surprisingly detailed knowledge of world affairs; her facility with languages, of which she was said to speak as many as eight; even her eminent suitability as a future national prime minister. As this wound tediously on, I found myself staring at his clothes. Pandiarajan, like all politicians in Amma’s party, wore a white shirt with a translucent front pocket. Tucked inside was a clearly visible picture of Amma, worn in the most public possible demonstration of loyalty, her face turned outwards to watch over us sternly as we talked.
If servility was one side of Jayalalithaa’s rule, corruption was the other. Uniquely among serving Indian chief ministers, she was jailed in 2014, having been found guilty of acquiring “disproportionate” assets while in office. During her first period in power in the early 1990s, her personal holdings rose from virtually nothing to around Rs530 million ($8 million), despite having a notional salary of just R1 a month.6 Subsequent court proceedings revealed lurid details of her wealth, including the findings of a police raid at one of her homes, which unearthed a collection of more than seven hundred pairs of shoes and ten thousand saris, along with substantial holdings of gold jewelry.7 The case dragged on for the better part of two decades; its latter portion moved to the neighboring state of Karnataka, for fear that a fair trial would be impossible within her own fiefdom. The eventual guilty judgment created a sensation: Indian chief ministers were often accused of corruption, but until then none had actually been convicted. Local media reported more than a dozen suicides in response, while many more supporters were said to have died of shock.8 Her temporary replacement as the state’s leader, a steadfast party man, refused even to sit at the chief minister’s desk, while he waited loyally for her to resume her duties.
Jayalalithaa’s incarceration did little to dent her popularity. Although sentenced to four years, she served less than a month before being acquitted on a technicality, allowing her to return as chief minister for a fifth time. At the next state poll in 2016, Tamil Nadu’s seventy million people handed her another thumping victory, in the process making her the first chief minister in a generation to win reelection in the state’s topsy-turvy political system. Her campaign showed all of the usual touches. “Voters were already speculating whether Amma will give away refrigerators or motorcycles this time,” as an essay in Outlook magazine noted just before the poll. “She didn’t disappoint.”9 Among the various treats on offer were free mobile phones, subsidized scooters, yet more laptops for students, and a free 8-gram gold coin for women who were soon to marry.
Her supporters’ fanaticism continued despite her conviction. In 2015, to mark the chief minister’s sixty-seventh birthday, Shihan Hussaini, a karate instructor and ardent Jayalalithaa loyalist, crucified himself in her honor. Wearing a white T-shirt with the word “Amma” across its front in large red letters, he stood arms stretched out as students from his karate school nailed him to a plywood cross for six agonizing minutes. An audience of invited party workers looked on, along with a handful of television cameras, who broadcast the proceedings live.10 Two years earlier, Hussaini had honored Jayalalithaa’s sixty-fifth birthday by fashioning a bust of her face from 11 liters of his own blood, which he had drawn carefully over a period of years. Such acts were undoubtedly extreme, but more modest forms of self-mutilation in the chief minister’s honor remained fairly common.
More skeptically minded Tamils questioned whether this personality cult—the fawning party men, fervent acts of affection, and periodic bouts of self-harm—disguised a regime that had lost touch with its people, as if those involved were simply reading from a script that had lost all real meaning. Yet as far as I could tell, the affection and respect for Jayalalithaa was real. Despite her reputation for corruption, many wealthy professionals in Chennai rated her a competent administrator and showed a sneaking admiration for her authoritarian style. Local villagers, many of whom had received unexpected gifts bearing the chief minister’s name, saw her as a caring benefactor, something akin to the “mother” of the Tamil people that her own propaganda suggested.
Certainly the outpouring of emotion that greeted her death in late 2016 seemed genuine. Rumors of Jayalalithaa’s failing health had swirled around Chennai for years, providing an explanation for her ever more reclusive behavior. Public discussion of the topic was largely forbidden, however: loyalists did not mention that she was a longtime diabetic, while journalists were wary of writing about it, for fear of facing legal action. Perhaps this was why her death, when it finally came after an extended hospital stay, caused such shock. More than one hundred supporters were said to have taken their own lives, as the state was overwhelmed with extravagant demonstrations of grief, including a spate of further unsuccessful suicides, and one supporter who respectfully cut off his own finger.11 “This anxiety surrounding her health, or rather her mortality, acquired an absurd resonance,” as Tamil historian V. Geetha wrote in an obituary, published shortly after her death.12 “The injunction to even imagine that her health could be deteriorating, showed her in a new and vulnerable light: she was literally being placed outside the pale of what we consider human.” Her death brought with it a sense of relief, as if the state Jayalalithaa had dominated as a kind of indestructible demigod could now finally begin to contemplate the inevitability of her absence.
Stationary Thieves
Jayalalithaa fitted almost too easily the image of comedy autocrat, with her record of personal enrichment and periodic brutality. But she was also a complex and in many ways admirable figure, as well as one whose ruling style illustrated the rich variety of crony capitalism found across India. Her story resonated with the public for its cinematic quality, from the glamour of her film stardom to the determination of her political rise, with its many pitfalls and fight-backs. She rose to power not just as a woman in a patriarchal society, but also as a Brahmin in a state where upper-caste status remained toxic. At times she drew on her femininity: early in her career she won sympathy by storming out of the state assembly having been manhandled by a male politician, in an episode that drew comparisons with Draupadi, a character in the Mahābhārata who suffered the humiliati
on of being disrobed in public.13 Yet she later transcended this same feminine image too, abandoning the starlet of her youth and fashioning in its place a public persona that was at once matronly and menacing.
Jayalalithaa’s personal life was complicated, not least her longtime friendship with a female aide who lived for decades in her plush Chennai bungalow, and with whom she had an intimate relationship as part confidant, part political adviser. The arrangement was the subject of much intrigue, but through force of will, Jayalalithaa had it accepted. Unlike many Indian political leaders, she made little effort to establish a dynasty, a fact that became obvious when her party collapsed into infighting after her death. Newspapers reveled in lurid details of her wealth, notably her shoe collection, which drew comparisons with former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos. Yet her later popularity sprang more from the supposed modesty of her lifestyle and the conservatism of her demeanor. Those who knew her described an intelligent and thoughtful leader, who spoke in flawless convent-educated English and preferred literature to politics. “She read widely, and used to ask me for book recommendations,” an experienced diplomat in New Delhi who worked closely with her once told me. As her health worsened, even her reclusive habits invited sympathy. “The past, which shapes her present, is marked by her loneliness,” the Tamil writer Vaasanthi, her unofficial biographer, wrote a few years before she died.14
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