When politics imitates silver screen

 It is often said that art imitates life. But in Tamil Nadu, art, particularly cinema, is so closely tied with politics that it is not easy to separate one from the other. Unsurprisingly, 2012 had its fair share of real and reel juxtaposed into one.

The Opposition DMK’s first family was in the thick of it, not just in connection with the on-going developments in the 2G spectrum allocation scam cases, but also a huge granite mining scam coming to the open on top of land-grab charges.  

But the first clash of stars in the political arena came when the actor-turned-politician and DMDK leader Vijayakant, who, in his typically abrasive style, engaged in a verbal duel with Chief Minister J Jayalalitha in the floor of the Assembly when it was in session in February.

Forced to forge an alliance with the DMDK before the 2011 elections to ensure it had the numbers to form the government in the event of a hung assembly, the AIADMK, which eventually had the numbers to function as a majority party, dramatically snapped ties with the fledgling party.

There was an inevitable sense of déjà vu, when Sasikala made a return to the Jayalalitha’s Poes Garden home after delivering a tearful apology four months after she and 14 other members of her family were unceremoniously expelled from the party. It reminded a similar episode in 1996, shortly after Jayalalitha lost power in the state.

By the year end, Sasikala managed to complete answering queries by a Special Court in
Bangalore hearing the “wealth case” against the duo and a few others.

The homecoming of former union telecom minister and DMK leader A Raja also had resonances of a sentimental flick. Having been released on bail on May 15 from Tihar Jail, where he was lodged for 16 months in connection with the 2G scam, Raja was given an enthusiastic welcome in Chennai on June 8.

DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi reached out to his “younger brother” and even affirmed he will continue as DMK’s propaganda secretary.

Raja, though, did not touch down to the larger-than-life cutouts greeting him at Chennai airport, as it did for Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi earlier. But the show of warmth and solidarity looked straight out of a Tamil movie.

The “real versus reel life” dialectic played out even more ingenuously after the Rs 16,000-crore scam in illegal granite mining near Madurai came to the fore in July-August. Durai Dayanidhi, son of DMK’s South strongman and Union Fertiliser Minister M K Alagiri, was charged in one of the scam cases as a former Director of “Olympus Granite,” slammed with serious mining violations.

As Police hunted Durai, he went under after applying for anticipatory bail in the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court, to avert what he and Alagiri termed “political vendetta.”

But after getting advance bail and surrendering his passport in a Melur court on December 14, Durai finally spilled the beans to a Tamil journal saying, he had literally “spent those 127 days continuously travelling in a car in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh”.

The concepts of love and romance might be sacred to all Tamil movies, but Dr S Ramadoss, leader of the OBC Vanniyars-dominated PMK, pulled out a new script denouncing all “love marriages,” after anti-Dalit violence erupted on November 8 in Dharmapuri district, triggered by a Vanniyar girl marrying a Dalit boy.

While DMK heir-apparent M K Stalin defied “Hurricane Sandy” to reach New York in early November to hand over copies of the DMK-TESO meet resolutions on the Sri Lankan Tamils to the United Nations, the last word this year came from DMK’s senior-most leader K Anbazhagan, who turned 91 on December 19.

“But I am only 32 years old,” he quipped on the occasion to explain how being young is in the mind.