It can happen only in a vibrant democracy like India. It takes decades for a politician to build his/her political career but only a few minutes for courts to destroy it.
This is exactly what happened to J. Jayalalitha on Sept. 27 when she walked into a Bangalore court of Judge John D’Cunha as chief minister of Tamil Nadu. Barely seven minutes later she was pronounced guilty in an 18-year-old criminal case of acquiring assets disproportionate to her known sources of income, jailed for four years and fined about $16 million.
The immediate fallout of the court verdict was that she had to quit as chief minister of Tamil Nadu. What is more, the four-time chief minister has been disqualified from contesting in the state assembly elections, which are just about two years away. Thus the 32-year-old political career of the former film actress was over in just seven minutes!
The 66-year-old Jayalalitha is the first sitting chief minister of India to have been rudely thrown out of the CM’s chair by a court order. There have been many former chief ministers to get to the wrong end of the stick of Indian courts and, like Jayalalitha, they were founding leaders of powerful regional parties, but they were not chief ministers when the courts smashed their political careers. Lalu Prasad Yadav and Shibu Soren are some of the recent examples of Indian politicians who fell foul of the Indian criminal jurisprudence system.
But Jayalalitha was far different from any of the many regional satraps Indian politics has spawned since the era of coalition politics dawned on the country a quarter century ago. Jayalalitha is the supreme leader of the AIADMK, which has a powerful sway in the southern state of Tamil Nadu and the contiguous union territory Puducherry, which together send 40 lawmakers to the 543-member Lok Sabha.
In the April-May Indian general elections this year, Jayalalitha’s AIADMK had won 37 out of 39 seats in Tamil Nadu. In contrast, the 129-year-old Congress party finished with just 44 seats.
Her political stock was so high that she was being viewed as a potential prime minister in the run up to Indian elections 2014. If Narendra Modi had not come up with such a landslide victory and had the elections thrown up a hung Parliament, Jayalalitha would have been a serious contender for the post of premier.
But now she and her party AIADMK are facing their worst-ever existential crisis. And if the trial court is not reversed (the chances of a reprieve from higher courts for Jayalalitha look remote) it may well prove to be the end of the road for Jayalalitha.
In the worst-case scenario, Jayalalitha remains in jail for four years. In case this happens, she will be out of the jail only in 2018; full two years after Tamil Nadu would have elected its fresh assembly. Presuming that she will be free to contest elections then, it will be a Herculean task for her and she will have to rebuild her party from the scratch at that time at the ripe age of 70.
There are four important political fallouts from the great fall of Jayalalitha.
1. Myth of politicians’ invincibility is completely busted and politicians have to adjust to new realities: That they are not above law and are accountable to the system.
2. If Jayalalitha has to blame someone for her current political wilderness it is not the maverick politician Subramaniam Swamy who had lodged the criminal case against her in 1996, but Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi.
It was Rahul who had forced the Manmohan Singh government last year to ensure that the Supreme Court’s judgment striking down a provision in the electoral law that effectively shielded politicians is not tinkered with. As a result of Rahul’s intervention, Lalu Prasad Yadav had gone to jail then and disqualified from contesting elections; now it is the turn of Jayalalitha.
3. Tamil Nadu politics has suddenly opened up to countless permutations and combinations. Jayalalitha’s archrival M. Karunanidhi, 90, may be over the moon but his DMK party is a divided house.
The Jayalalitha case verdict effectively promises to usher in a new phase of politics where former chief ministers like Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha, who have dominated the state and national politics for decades, are marginalized and new generation of leaders will have to come up in these two regional parties if they have to survive.
4. Bigger national parties like the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are in for a whale of a chance to have a powerful role in Tamil Nadu, the former better placed in that context.
