The defeat of the AIADMK led by J. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu has a political message. It exposes the pitfalls of bidding for the minority vote bank by antagonising the Hindus. Jayalalithaa who had lost her cool after the rout in the last Lok Sabha elections took to wooing the minorities in an unabashed display of arrogant vendetta. She arrested and humiliated His Holiness Shri Jayendra Saraswati one of the most revered saints and head of the 2000-year-old mutt of Kanchi in a murder case. The Supreme Court has made more than one adverse observation on the handling of the case by the State government.
Jayalalithaa, who had carefully cultivated a Hindu image, through her much-publicised gifting of elephant to the temple in Guruvayur, temple-tank renovation programmes, banning religious conversion in the State and such moves, went back on each of the project that appeared even remotely related to Hindus. The ultimate sin was her foisting the Shankar Raman murder case on the aged H.H. Shankracharya Jayendra Saraswati.
The DMK, the other Kazhagam, whose ideology is anything non-Hindu, had wisely kept off Hindu baiting. It had even murmured protests about the State interfering in religious mutts, when the police raided the Kanchi mutt.
Jayalalithaa went beyond all this. She hired discredited socialites like Anuradha Ramanan to talk cheap personal indignities on the Shankaracharya and the mutt. She attempted to stifle the voices that supported H.H. Shankracharya Jayendra Saraswati. She was so involved that it looked as if she was the police officer investigating the case.
The Brahmin Samaj, minorities they might be, took a stand before the elections and appealed to people to vote against the AIADMK. Not that DMK is their friend. The Brahmins in Tamil Nadu have borne the brunt of the anti-God movement of the Dravida Kazhagam and E V Ramaswamy Naicker. It is obviously inconvenient for the secular broadcasters to acknowledge that the Hindu vote cost Jayalalithaa her chair. One only has to look at the vote polled by Vijaykant, the latest entrant in the political field in the Tamil land. He has clearly got all the disenchanted votes of Jayalalithaa but were loathe to go to Karunanidhi.
Jayalalithaa smirked in satisfaction when her party won the Kanchipuram by-election about a year ago, where the BJP?Hindu Munnai candidate lost deposit. She had deployed half a dozen ministers and as many MLAs, instructing them to win the seat or else?! Her supporters waved this result as a proof that the Acharya case is a non-issue, even in the home of the mutt.
But the resounding defeat she suffered now is a proof that Hindu vote counts and counts decisively.
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