AIADMK chief Jayala-lithaa speaks to the media at her Poes Garden house in Chennai on Friday. PHOTO: PTI

It’s a grand win for J. Jayalalithaa and her AIADMK party, but the victory of the people of Tamil Nadu is grander still. For quite some time now the rest of the country had been looking down on them as an electorate up for sale. Many of them at the poll booths on April 13 might have taken money but they still went ahead and obeyed their

conscience. In an election that saw the biggest play of money — despite excellent work by the Election Commission — the verdict demonstrated louder than ever that democracy triumphs over the brute exertions of the corrupt politician.
Verdict 2011 is a message for not just the politicians of Tamil Nadu but to all across the country, that one cannot indulge in corruption and get away with that. A big battery of campaigners had proclaimed the virtues of the DMK regime and marketed freebies in the poll manifesto. And yet, when those votes were counted on Friday, Ms Jayalalithaa and her aam admi won handsomely with the AIADMK supremo set to become chief minister a third time.
At the time of going to press the AIADMK had won 146 seats and was leading in another four. The DMK had won 20 seats and was ahead in three while ally Congress, which contested 63 seats, could manage only five wins.
Chief minister M. Karunanidhi won his Tiruvarur seat with a big lead of over 50,000 votes but he cannot celebrate it. His son, M.K. Stalin, managed to scrape through with a margin of about 2,400 votes after a long session of arguments by his poll representatives with AIADMK rival Saidai S. Duraisamy in Kolathur, north Chennai. If all their calculations had gone right, the father would have made way for his long-waiting prince to take the throne midway this term after pacifying the other son, Union minister Alagiri.
More importantly, the DMK patriarch would have done his best to protect daughter Kanimozhi from getting arrested in the spectrum case. Had things gone the way his aides had planned, he would have tried to cement ties with the Congress by offering to share power in the state and in return expect help in the 2G probe.
Almost all the DMK heavyweights lost. The losers’ list includes general secretary K. Anbazhagan in Villivakkam in north Chennai. Higher education minister K. Ponmudi, transport minister K.N. Nehru, agriculture minister Veerapandi Arumugam, health minister M.R.K. Panneerselvam and rural industries minister Pongalur Palanisamy are some of the big heads that rolled.
Mr Karunanidhi has larger worries than losing power. The sleuths of the CBI, income-tax department and Enforcement Directorate are snooping around his Gopalapuram and CIT Colony houses. The CBI court in Delhi is conducting the spectrum case on a fast-track basis and will decide Ms Kanimozhi’s bail application on Saturday. It upset him a bit when his blue-eyed boy, former Union communications minister A. Raja, was arrested and put in Tihar jail in the same case. But should his daughter face the same fate, it will shatter the DMK patriarch.
The DMK expected much from this poll. The Alagiri formula, hatched during the Thirumangalam byelection in 2009, was perfected by the elder son in all the polls that followed to deliver success. Money-for-votes became the mantra for the DMK campaign managers and Mr Alagiri, from his Madurai headquarters, would boast that he would ensure victory after victory in every election. The ruling family assumed that Poll-2011 was no different. But two things derailed this — the intense policing done by the Election Commission, which made significant money seizures, and the public disgust at the deep-rooted corruption in the DMK administration. Tamil Nadu has never returned a chief minister for a successive second term, barring MGR. This anti-incumbency trait only intensified further due to the spectrum scam and other illustrations of high corruption. The voter had also grown bitter about Mr Karunanidhi promoting his family in every possible field, including entertainment and real estate.
“But you cannot say this Jayalalithaa win is just an anti-incumbency vote against the DMK. Do not equate Jayalalithaa’s win with that of Mamata Banerjee. The people of West Bengal took a chance with Mamata because they do not know what kind of government she would give them. It was purely an anti-CPM, anti-incumbency negative vote,” says political analyst Cho Ramaswamy. “But here, while the people were very angry and disgusted with the DMK government and wanted it to go, they also wanted Jayalalithaa to come to power so that the administration, derailed by corruption and mismanagement, can be put back on the rails. People here have seen her good governance in the past and so wanted her back. This is as much a positive vote for her as it is a negative vote against Karunanidhi, who spent much of his time at film functions and felicitations.”
When the final results emerge late at night, Mr Karunanidhi might even end up below the DMDK captain, Vijayakanth, the new ally of Ms Jayalalithaa, in the party score in the new Assembly. True, Mr Karunanidhi has faced worse defeats and still bounced back, but then he was a bit younger, and much stronger, and did not have the spectrum of problems he now does.