 Hello and welcome to NewsClick, this program with rail news. Today we have with us Shastri Ramachandan, a well-known journalist who has covered Tamil Nadu, China, India and lots of other issues. Shastri, we have had a huge outpouring of grief with Jai Lalitha's death. She undoubtedly was one of the more charismatic figures on the Tamil Nadu stage. What explains her popularity and this kind of adulation grief that we saw? I think the government at the center wanted to create kind of extrapolate this grief, you know, as if it is being borne by all the people all over the country. I am sure people in UP and Bihar and elsewhere who are standing in line to change their currency notes are least unmoved by what is going on in Tamil Nadu or even in their own states. But this was for the center to show, oh, we are very much part of the picture. So everybody wanted a stake in her popularity and her popularity which has not disappeared or been buried with her. It is still alive as a political legacy to be cashed in upon. So what explains this popularity? I think MGR was hugely popular and actually there is also a carder base that the difference in the votes pulled by the DMK and the AII DMK in any elections is I think always less than four or five percent. Sometimes there is only two to three percent. The difference between the two? Between the two. Because you have the carders and the DK carders are split down the middle right down to the district from the state level. The DK being the original Madhav Karagam. That the Madhav Karagam which is the movement that came of the Justice Party movement of which the DMK and the ADMK are parliamentary political parties. So it is basically the DK carder that sustains the DMK and the AII DMK. Then you have add-ons to that with the Congress party for a long time accounting for say ten to fifteen percent of the vote which it could swing this way or that and get a majority of Lok Sabha seats in return for a smaller portion of assembly seats. Now there is no doubt that Jayalalitha M.G. Ramachandran was popular as a film star. His popularity base was huge and Jayalalitha was accepted regardless of the fact that she was not from the Justice Party or the Dravidha Karagam movement or part of the Dravidha movement in any way. She was accepted as a leader because she was seen as the heir to MGR. And this was tested because you had Jayalalitha's MGR's second or I do not know if Janaki was the third wife but you had Janaki Ramachandran and Jayalalitha. And Janaki also was chief minister for a while. And eventually when the chips were down it is Jayalalitha who emerged on top of the situation. It is also interesting that Tamil politics has also been governed by Tamil films which is something not so well known outside Tamil Nadu. The close nexus as you said with the Tamil films, the kind of films that were there which MGR, Karnanidhi, all of them were a part of in different ways. And the fact that Jayalalitha really inherits that film legacy. Yeah actually the films in which MGR acted also are the kind of manifesto from which he drew his programs to. For instance one of the most popular schemes of MGR was the known meal scheme which has been hailed by international organizations like UNICEF and so on because it has increased levels of child nutrition, school attendance and so on. And then they also introduced free meals for the poor in Tamil Nadu. And Jayalalitha went further and she introduced free meals for Muslims with biryani and eggs and things like that. So you had a large number of welfare measures. And when I speak of films one of MGR's earliest films was a film called Annamitakai the hand that feeds. So the idea of the known meal scheme was taken from this film Annamitakai. Again if you see MGR's film Riksha Karnan, he is shown as giving away shawls to Riksha people known as personally a generous man in terms of giving away things to the poor compared to other film stars like NTR who rose to political power. So that is based on his film Riksha Karnan. And so many of the things that he did he derived from his films and the scriptwriters of largely influenced by the communist parties, you know the driver movement, their manifesto and their egalitarian outlook, everything. It's an interesting point you are talking about that both the parties and Jayalalitha definitely built themselves on welfare, a lot of it was welfare and it's also interesting it goes against the current ethos which argues that austerity is what the government should practice, welfare is wasteful. But if you see Tamil Nadu, all the indices that you are, if you see employment, the growth per capita. Economically it's among the top states in the country. So the welfare has not caused the kind of impact it's supposed to do if you take austerity economics into account which actually Gujarat follows and Gujarat is a very interesting counter example, no welfare or much less welfare and supposed to have good indices of development but if you take all the other figures malnutrition, all these figures Gujarat does very poorly compared to Tamil Nadu, well Tamil Nadu does well on employment as well. Yes, I just want to quickly kind of take the schemes that have been there because we can trace the kind of reinforcement of Jayalalitha's popularity based on NGR and the ADMK and the dravidak. What really kind of reinforced it is the slew of scheme she came up with in recent years. For instance, salt, salt is very essential. You had Amma salt, then you had Amma bottled water, you had Amma pharmacies and Amma theaters where tickets would not be more than 10, this thing. And Amma cantines. And I have been to these Amma cantines and it's really amazing. I don't know what is the nutritional value of it but it definitely leaves your stomach full. Maybe there aren't enough vegetables in the sambar or dal in the sambar but you can eat for a full day, three full meals for less than 12 rupees. I don't think it's possible anywhere else in the world except in Tamil Nadu. Then there are things that are less known, for instance they give 1 lakh rupees is given across the counter if anyone has a heart problem and requires a surgery and this is open to all people in Tamil Nadu who are poor. All they have to do is take their ration card and go and they undergo, go to the hospital. So no hospital turns away a person for surgery because money is required. Then there is a good hospital network unlike Gujarat for instance, a very large percentage of the population is covered by hospitals, government hospitals in Tamil Nadu which has a large number of private colleges today. I think the total number of colleges are nearly 39 medical colleges compared to what was only 11 government medical colleges. So you have this welfare net which is huge, education is very good. You have government arms competing with each other, you have not only government schools, government girls high school and boys high school but you also have corporation schools in places like Chennai which produce much better results than many of the private schools. Next issue after Jailalitha who of course this has been a question. Now Shashikala who was her close companion, she had earlier sort of separated from her family to say that she was going to be only part of Jailalitha's family as it were. Now she is emerging apparently as a heir apparent but her family, Shashikala's family seems to have moved back with her. So the old charge against Shashikala that this led to a lot of nepotism, lot of family getting prominence, all that become back. So how do you look at the succession issue within ADMK? To the Tamil voters these are all very remote democratic issues, they are entirely theoretical and abstract, they are not concerned with these things at all. For them it is Amma, after Amma will it be Chinnama for the people in the area. Chinnama being Shashikala. Shashikala and in the DMK also it is a family enterprise. Now for the time being the ADMK is also a family enterprise led by Shashikala. But unlike the DMK one does not know how independent or autonomous the ADMK is. What you have in Tamil Nadu is not the government of Shashikala. She might be the one who can press the switch but the one who has got the socket and plug is Mr. Narendra Modi in Delhi. This is actually Modi's halkaar by other means that you have in Tamil Nadu right now. Where they have kind of manufactured a consensus among the various factions in the area ADMK to have a particular person as chief minister and to also allow the power centers below and behind the chief minister to function. This is the first stage of the operation which I see has a holding operation while they are trying to see who are the others who need to be accommodated. What kind of negotiations should take place, who shall be the intermediaries. Now Shashikala's family, it is a very complex network. Not everybody in the family is with her. There are reports that she is estranged from her husband and her husband is a political entrepreneur in his own right much like Shashikala and they were to have local body elections in December. Until the local body elections are held which will not be in December now one will not know whether Shashikala can hold the operation. As of now the government of India they call it stability but the real reason is they would like the ADMK without getting split, without being broken or anybody chipping away at it to remain in office at least till August next year till the president and vice president are elected because the AIADMK has 48 members in parliament. 11 in the Rajya Sabha and 37 in the Lok Sabha so this is very important plus the votes of all the MLAs is very important for the BJP to be able to have their own president when President Pradam Mukherjee retires in July 2017. So this is the prime concentration. Essentially one part is a tabildat politics, other is what is going to happen in the center and what you are saying is that right now AIADMK is actually being held together by also central governments needs to have the votes for the president and therefore the stake that the central government has, the Modi government has in AIADMK to stay united behind probably Shashikala as a figurehead but it is being held up like this. But in the long term we have to see how the things politically develop. Not very long term, in a few months one might see, there might be changes because there will be winners and losers and this is a kind of necropolitics. I mean necropolitics not in the extreme academic sense in which it is but where the politics of the living are based on the death of someone, I think this is peculiar to tabildat. Thank you very much for being with us, we will discuss more of these issues with you as things develop and as you say next three to six months should see how things develop in tabildat. Thank you very much to be with us. This is all the time we have today for NewsClick. Please keep watching NewsClick for further episodes.