17 May 2014, 03:25 PM IST
She is the victor who lost; the queen without the crown. Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa created history on Friday when her party AIADMK won 37 of the 39 seats in the state—the biggest tally for any party so far in Tamil Nadu. Yet, she couldn't get anywhere near power at the Centre when BJP would be sharing it with some parties that got just a couple of seats, maybe just one.
Elections offer takeaways for winner and losers, and here are a couple for Jayalalithaa: Strategic compromise is sometimes better than a Pyrrhic victory. Wishful thinking of a prospective post-poll ally under performing may be as dangerous as underestimating a rival.
The AIADMK prima donna has left none in doubt over her ability to win on her own, especially when there is a multi-cornered contest. But had she tied up with the BJP before the polls, she would have ended up having a handful of Union ministers, though with a lesser number of MPs.
Some may contest this on the premise that a Jayalalaithaa-Modi alliance would have triggered a reconfiguration of political equations in Tamil Nadu; that the DMK might have gone with the Congress; that the Left and the smaller parties would have joined such a coalition sensing anti-right polarisation.
Okay, so what?
The AIADMK might not have managed such huge margins in many places if Jayalalithaa, who started off a silent friend of Modi, didn't change tack midway her campaign and attacked the BJP after sensing a Muslim consolidation against her (But, mind you, she never attacked Modi). She would have lost some minority support had she joined hands with the BJP, but the results show that that would have been more than compensated by the BJP. The results also show that the rest of the parties in TN have not garnered enough to open an account under the NDA umbrella, and hence wouldn't have changed the pathetic fate of the DMK alliance.
It's common knowledge that the AIADMK, having shed the vestiges of the Dravidian philosophy long ago, would make a natural ally of the BJP. And Jayalalithaa made no secret of this: She was the first leader of another party to congratulate Narendra Modi when he became the chief minister of Gujarat last two times. The two leaders have been exchanging more than pleasantries over the phone for a while before the elections which both knew would make Modi the Prime Minister.
Given this bonhomie which never got to the level of mutual commitment, Jayalalithaa had two options before the elections: One, to join NDA as its leading partner in Tamil Nadu and give the BJP half-a-dozen winnable seats; two, to go it alone. The trade-off was, if she opted for the first, she would end up with a little over 30 seats, but, as the largest NDA partner, she could demand half-a-dozen ministerial berths for her MPs. The second, as she rightly read the anti-DMK/Congress mood in the state, would reap a richer harvest for her to emerge the king-maker if the NDA tally tottered around 250 seats.
To be fair to the Chennai Super Queen, she was probably right. Just that Modi was more right.
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