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Saisuresh Sivaswamy

Jaya and the art of laying landmines

In a country like India, where a bunch of crackers at the end of a Test match can set off mayhem, something far less evanescent like language could make and break governments. It has happened before -- most memorably in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s. The scars of that agitation run so deep that political parties even now bend over backwards in the south to display their love for the Dravida languages. The Bharatiya Janata Party goes to the extent of mothballing its prime vote-catcher, who sends crowds into raptures with his mastery over Hindi, in Tamil Nadu, settling for the less-in-appeal, high-in English Advani there. So wary is the BJP of stepping on chauvinist toes in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere, so overpowering its zeal to downplay its Hindi origins, that it makes quite a spectacle of itself.

Which is why, its readiness to concede its ally J Jayalalitha's demand to confer official status on all the languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, including of course Tamil, is incomprehensible. Given the enormity of problems the government would face if this decision were ever to be implemented, it is extremely odd that a party one thinks of as savvy, walks into a potential landmine so willingly.

On the face of it, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazagham general secretary's demand on language appears to be the most innocuous of her six-point charter over which she almost aborted the BJP's grand ambition of forming the government. After all, it is no secret that large parts of the country still question the validity of having Hindi as the main language. The question is not of any intrinsic defect in Hindi, but of the sense of elevating one among the numerous that are current in the land to a special status, and I daresay that I am in agreement with this.

What Jayalalitha has done, with a great deal of forethought, is to prepare the ground for another language agitation, which she obviously expects to turn to her advantage.

And historically speaking, she is not entirely wrong. Tamil Nadu has shown itself to be most susceptible to the winds flowing in defence of its culture and language, and it is evident that the former chief minister intends to repeat that phase of Tamil Nadu's history that powered the Dravida parties into power. The Congress, perceived as a north Indian party at the end of it all -- rather like the BJP today is, let me add for effect -- is yet to recover from that setback, and is till today, a whole generation later, forced to ride piggyback on either of the Dravida parties.

The administrative bottlenecks that the government's decision to upgrade the status of all the 19 languages in India would create have been dealt with by my esteemed colleague George Iype, and is not the subject matter here. What is, is the brazen attempt to politicise, once again, a dormant issue like language, and the BJP's own seeming non-perception of a tinderbox.

Leave alone the outcome if the BJP is unable to grant Jayalalitha her language wish, the scenario is none too bright if it comes through as well. Assuming that the clutch of languages come through as official ones, that will set off the numerous other linguistic minorities in the country clamouring for similar status for their tongues and dialects. Obviously, today's establishment has forgotten that more languages are spoken in the country than there are in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, each laying claim to its own piece of glory, of history.

Jayalalitha has obviously decided that her alliance with the BJP cannot go on forever, not when there is more than one sword of Damocles hanging over her in the form of judicial proceedings. She knows that the BJP front could rescue her from ignominy only at the risk of losing its own credibility, and there is no way her rank and file, not to mention her MPs, will allow her to support a government that is, in their view, throwing her to the wolves.

But shrewd as she is, Jayalalitha also knows that she will have to prepare the ground for pulling out of the BJP-led government, and do it in such a way as to come out of the entire episode not only unscathed but even with hosannas -- which is where the language issue comes into her calculations.

My own bet is that the BJP leadership is aware of the dynamics of Jayalalitha's mind, and is playing along, in the hope that they will be able to buy both time and support as they go through the motions of trying to implement the language decision.

By itself, I think the decision to upgrade all languages is not entirely a negative development; however, it is bound to flounder on the rocks of administrative hazards, and will have to be eventually abandoned.

Jayalalitha knows it well, and knows too that when that comes about it would enable her to don the garb of the defender of Tamil interests. After all, to be fair to her, all the six points she has raised with the BJP leadership prior to agreeing to join the government, have nothing personal but are specifically in the state's interests. That none of the demands will come around to be sanctioned by the Central government is another matter, just as the personal demands she may have implied to the BJP leadership when she agreed to support this government.

Jayalalitha's calculation is that even if the courts go after her, she will be able to prove her bona fides to her people by highlighting the fact that she, unlike the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in the United Front, sought so much for the state, never mind if she was done in by a north Indian outfit.

As I said earlier, she is playing a dangerous game. Barring a few interruptions in between, Tamil Nadu has remained free of language-oriented agitation since the '60s, the state has come out of its north-centric xenophobia, and by attempting to protect her interests, Jayalalitha may end up putting the clock back in a state where there is no dearth of developmental issues crying for attention.

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