In many of those famed ‘raja part’ roles he donned in the 1950s and later, Sivaji Ganesan would deliver kingly dialogues with theatrical fire that made his characters awe-inspiring for the audiences. On the Tamil cinema screen, it was a one-man spectacle like none else. That level of melodrama was something P. Ayyakannu and his team from the late thespian’s state employed all through their stir in Delhi this summer, even as their real-life roles were anything but royal.
Edited by Suraj Wadhwa/Outlook
The agitationists were all poor farmers, desperately trying to bring to national attention their plight accentuated by massive crop failures owing to persistent drought in the southeastern part of the peninsula. As the post-Holi sun baked the national capital, the 80-plus peasants from Tamil Nadu kept scripting one play or the other that helped them retain the attention of the media if not exactly the rulers. Lining up half-naked on central Delhi’s Jantar Mantar road, they would one day wear garlands of skulls, next day bite dead rats and, on a third occasion, drink urine. In full media glare like always, some of them even walked stark naked while scaling up the Raisina Hills towards the administrative blocks flanking the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
After 41 days of bizarre protests that saw them shave off one half of their heads, wail over a farmer’s ‘dead body’ and plead before a man wearing a mask of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the men called off their stir on April 23 and took the train back home. This was the first time Tamil farmers had agitated outside their native state, which had anyway become almost inured of such protests. That way, the six-week agitation was in itself an achievement, many would concede.
Whether or not the protests sparked empathy in the NDA government, the farmers’ novel ways did grab immense media attention—especially on television. They not only came up with varied tactics, the news channels were alerted in advance. “But for TV coverage, the protests would have petered out after a week,” says Tamil news channel’s representative. The protesters were also in direct contact with channel heads back in Chennai.
Video by Tribhuvan Tiwari; Edited by Rupesh Malviya
So, what were their demands before the rulers? The farmers, primarily, wanted a major jump in the drought relief: the Centre had given to Tamil Nadu Rs 2,014 crore to battle its worst drought against the state’s demand of Rs 39,565 crore. Also thrown into the charter of demands was the constitution of a Cauvery Water management Board, interlinking of southern rivers and a halt to extracting hydrocarbon in the state. Every Tamil Nadu leader made it a point to sit with the protesting farmers led by lawyer-farmer Ayyakannu, who heads the Farmers and Water Link Association. Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi came to extend support, DMK leader M.K. Stalin and his parliamentarian half-sister Kanimozhi from the same party showed up for a photo op. So did the state’s famous protest practitioners Vaiko and director-turned-politician Seeman.
“We moved our protests to Delhi because catching the attention of the Central government while sitting in Tamil Nadu does not work any longer,” explains Ayyakannu. The idea, he says, was to take a leaf out of Gandhian Anna Hazare’s 2011 Lok Pal agitation and the more recent one rank-one pension stir by ex-servicemen. According to Ayyakannu, “Initially, the Centre remained unmoved in our case, but they did take notice eventually. No less than three Union ministers visited us and we managed to meet half a dozen of them.” When their insistence on meeting the PM failed to cut ice, the farmers settled for a consolation prize to call off their protest: TN chief minister Edappadi K. Palanisami sat with them and promised to take their demands to Modi.
Protests in Tamil Nadu have never been devoid of drama. Writer and theatre person Gnani Sankaran points out that Tamil theatre had been used as political propaganda “with a pinch of drama” right from the freedom movement. Congress leaders led by S. Satyamurti (1887-1943) were the original torch-bearers of such moves when they staged anti-British plays, often surreptitiously, he notes. Later Dravidian leaders C.N. Annadurai and M. Karunanidhi took the plays to the next step. “They laced them with pungent dialogues on society’s inequalities, which later translated into successful scripts for movies,” notes Gnani, a pioneer of street theatre.
Also, Tamils have loved their heroes to be loud and demonstrative, scholars note. Breathless dialogue delivery was not a trademark of just Sivaji’s; his contemporary M.G. Ramachandran, too, was a master of the trade. A generation later, Vijayakanth did breathtaking stunts, not to speak of Rajinikanth’s stylish capers. As chief ministers, MGR, J. Jayalalitha and M. Karunanidhi have themselves resorted to protest fasts to demand more rice for the state, water from Cauvery and a halt to Sri Lanka’s war against the rebel LTTE—in that order. Since these CMs came from cinema, they easily carried their performance into the political theatre as well.
"Tamils are a very emotional people; their expressions are always exaggerated,” points out comedian Bosskey, explaining their love for what many would feel is overkill. “Sivaji was accused of overacting. But his fans wanted him to perform that way. Hyped-up histrionics was expected of him,” he notes. “An underwhelming performance by Sivaji would have proved disastrous at the box office and even raised serious doubts about his talent.”
This is probably why the Tamil voters, while not voting for Vaiko, still love to watch the MDMK leader perform on the stage: shrugging his shoulders, constantly adjusting his black shawl around his neck and spewing a torrent of Tamil topics from Cuban missile standoff (yes, even today) to Karunanidhi’s betrayal of Sri Lankan Tamils. “The Tamils can easily be swayed by rhetoric, especially in the Dravidian style,” says DMK spokesperson K.S. Radhakrishnan, who had also been with Vaiko. “It should be full of alliterations, historical allusions and cultural symbolism. What used to be dialogues penned by Anna (ex-CM C.N. Annadurai) and Karunanidhi in their plays and films moved over to the political stage from the ’60s. Vaiko is a past master at this style of speaking.”
When Karunanidhi expelled Vaiko from the DMK in 1993, five ardent admirers of the outgoing leader committed suicide in protest. “Even today, Vaiko honours them every year with a martyr’s day remembrance,” points out a senior MDMK leader. “In Tamil Nadu, self-immolation is viewed as the ultimate form of protest or as the high point of loyalty to the leader. It started during the 1965 anti-Hindi stir, continued during MGR’s hospitalisation and death (in end-1987) and is staged every now and then during an agitation.”
Since political leaders tend to glorify such deaths as the greatest sacrifice for the cause of Tamils, many such copycat self-immolations keep happening. “Why cannot the cadres answer a simple question,” asks former TNCC chief E.V.K.S. Elangovan. “Has any political leader or his close relative ever self-immolated for the cause they are so vociferous about? Why do cadres fall prey to such emotional rhetoric of their leaders?” It is time for Tamil protestors to pause and think, he adds.
Even heroes of Tamil mythology are known for an overarching sense of justice. Pandya king Nedunchezhiyan, going by the Sangam-era classic Silappathikaram, killed himself after realising he sent the wrong man—Kannagi’s husband Kovalan—to the gallows. Chola king Manuneedhi, according to legends, killed his own son under the wheels of a chariot after a cow had rung the ‘bell of justice’ in the palace courtyard following the prince’s running over its calf.
Today, for a state with a high economic index, Tamil Nadu has strangely been plagued by a slew of protests on some issue or the other of late. In mid-January, nearly a lakh youngsters gathered on the Marina Beach over the Jallikattu issue that lasted almost a week. The state government tackled it by bringing in a law permitting to hold the traditional bull-taming game. The protests were showing signs of going sideways as one heard shrill demands of a separate Tamil Nadu, revival of the separatist LTTE and questioning Delhi’s authority over the state.
Just as the Jallikattu protests faded into memory, the farmers in Pudukottai district gathered in large numbers in February-March to oppose the extraction of hydrocarbons from the shale bed near their Neduvasal village. Just then, a fisherman got killed by the Lankan navy, sparking another agitation at Rameswaram. The state allowed the protests to meander as long as the target of the protestors was Delhi. It suited the local rulers that public anger was directed towards Delhi, and not Chennai, thus diverting attention from its own failure to tackle the drought and drinking water scarcity. “The hydrocarbon issue was sanctioned by the oil and gas ministry, while the fishermen problem is handled by the external affairs ministry—and it is Delhi that stalled the formation of the Cauvery board,” says a senior state minister. “How are we involved in any way? We make sure that there is no issue of law and order. It is high time Delhi woke up to this issue.”
So what is it that triggers protests in Tamil Nadu, especially in the last few months? “The spontaneous protests that we are witnessing today are a symptom of the political vacuum in the state,” explains writer D. Ravikumar, general secretary of the anti-caste Viduthulai Chiruthaigal Katchi. “The state had been witness to a strong centralised political leadership. After Jayalalitha’s death (on December 5 last year), there has only been a stopgap leadership. Even the present CM’s tenure has a question mark over it. The political instability is leading to popular anguish finding expression more frequently.”
The leaders of the traditional political parties have also resorted to mere tokenism, holding prearranged demonstrations, courting symbolic arrests and making predictable speeches—everything tailor-made for TV cameras. Also Tamil Nadu has been constantly fighting inter-state issues with its neighbours on Cauvery, Mullaiperiyar and Palar and there are regular skirmishes between Tamil fishermen and the Lankan navy. So there is no dearth of issues for staging a protest when political one-upmanship remains the underlying theme.
MDMK’s Vaiko leads a Tirunelveli stir against the Kudankulam project in ’12
Many also blame protesters and say their continuation beyond a timeframe is media-driven and competitive coverage by Tamil news channels artificially keeps such protests alive. M. Gunasekaran, editor of News 18 Tamil, vehemently denies this charge. “The Jallikattu protests were initiated entirely through social media. Only on seeing its spontaneity, TV channels covered them widely,” he says. “Our coverage might have given legitimacy and sustenance to the protests. Also, only after TV channels took it nationally were state and the Centre forced to amend the pertinent Act.” Gunasekaran also argues that constant TV coverage also compelled celebrities like film stars, RJs and even the middle class to join or identify themselves with the Jallikattu protests.
Sometimes the protests die down after the state government toughens its posture. When the Jayalalitha government decided to push for power generation from the nuclear plant in Kudankulam, faced with a massive power crisis in 2012, the protests died a natural death. But when she opposed GAIL’s gas pipeline project, saying it would affect farmers, the project got stalled, in turn affecting supply of CNG to industries.
State BJP leaders suspect that most of the recent protests have been aimed more at Delhi than at the ruling establishment in the state. “There definitely is a hidden hand behind these protests to put the Modi government on the defensive,” claims BJP national secretary H. Raja. “It could be part of a larger plan to stop our party from expanding its base in the state. But what worries us more is that many fringe groups with anti-national tendencies are keeping these protests alive. They need to be tackled.”
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One After The Other
- 2011-12: Anti-Kudankulam protests (The nuclear plant eventually starts working in 2013)
- 2012: Protests against GAIL pipes on farm lands (project stalled in 2013)
- 2012: Protest against methane extraction in Cauvery Delta (project scrapped in Nov, 2016)
- 2016: Protests against K’taka on the Cauvery issue (The board delayed)
- 2017: Jallikattu protests (law enables holding of the bull-taming game)
- 2017: Farmers protest against hydrocarbon extraction (government withholds permission)
- 2017: Farmers protest in Delhi for more drought relief from Centre
