Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar
Much depends on whether Benazir and Jayalalitha are prepared to
distance themselves from their respective companions
The Pudukottai by-election is a pointer to where thing are headed.
Where, but eight months ago, the AIADMK was routed in this assembly
segment by a margin of 43,000 votes, the margin of defeat has
now been cut to a mere 12,000. This notwithstanding the fact that
there was then no rebel AIADMK, that the PMK and Janata Dal were
not aligned with the DMK as this time round, that the Congress
was then but not now in alliance with the AIADMK, and that Jayalalitha
herself campaigned in Pudukottai in 1996 where ill-health prevented
her at the last moment from going to the support of her candidate
in 1997.
The DMK made her prosecution for corruption the central
plank of its campaign; the AIADMK made her persecution at the
hands of the DMK government the central plank of its campaign.
The moral victory was Jayalalitha's even if the seat went to the
DMK. The AIADMK is catching up so fast with the DMK-TMC combine
that by the next by-election that restoration of the normal balance
of power in Tamil Nadu as between the two principal Dravidian
parties is only to expected.
In Pakistan, similarly, it is not any great accretion in Nawaz
Shari's vote that has accounted for his victory but the large
number of PPP voters who preferred to simply stew away from the
polls. After all, if Benazir was dismissed under the Eighth Amendment
for corruption, Nawaz was also dismissed under the same Eighth
Amendment for corruption. What, then, was there to choose between
the two for the voter for whom corruption was the issue?
Unsurprisingly,
the turnout was abysmally low.
Should Benazir hit her stride --
and that remains, for the present, a big speculative IF -- the
PPP voter would decide to go vote and, therefore the results of
future Pakistan by-elections could be not dissimilar to the signals
from Pudukottai.
Much depends on whether Benazir and Jayalalitha are prepared to
distance themselves from their respective companions. Jayalalitha
has announced that the has nothing future to do with Sasikala
and her kin. The claim lacks credibility but she seems at least
to have dumped Sasikala's relatives, such as the nephew Jayalalitha
adopted on the eve of his celebrated wedding in September 1995,
the multi-million jamboree which was the proximate cause of her
electoral defeat.
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