The impressive optics of the Tamil Nadu chief minister’s trips to UK, USA and Dubai are not the only indicators of the State's CEO having truly emerged as a leader in his own right. His deft handling of the administration in the post-Jayalalithaa maelstrom has been so thorough as to have seen him rise to become the prominent and dominant figure in the AIADMK. In that time he also effectively manoeuvred the position of O Panneerselvam to one more in keeping with his title of deputy CM.
The rudderless phase that came with Jaya’s hospitalisation and her subsequent demise, which led to the ambitions of many sprouting suddenly, did not end with the selection of Edappadi Palaniswami in the wake of the disqualification of Jaya confidante Sasikala. It may have taken two years for the chief minister to feel confident enough to be able to leave the State for an extended foreign trip, but in that time he has consolidated his position in the party to a near supremo role without quite having to tread Jaya’s dictatorial path to assert his control and authority.
The time of merger of the OPS faction and the trust vote in the Assembly represented very tense moments in the politics of AIADMK. Not long before then, OPS was very much in the driver’s seat as acting CM during Jaya’s illness when he was also in the good books of Prime Minister Modi and his lieutenant Amit Shah. He was in a position to call all the shots on Tamil Nadu. His inability to be forceful enough with Sasikala and her nephew TTV Dhinakaran and his propensity to carry his woes to New Delhi saw him lose out in the succession battle.
The rise of Palaniswami as the next most trusted aide of the Poes Garden cabal could not have come about without the Supreme Court verdict condemning Sasikala to the Parappana Agrahara jail in Bengauru. To his credit, Palaniswami did not sit idle on the chair. He had to fight a fierce battle against Sasikala's nephew and his attempts towards trying to take the AIADMK with him as he was the one who had brought the new CM to his chair after his aunt was sent into the political wilderness in the Supreme Court ruling in the DA case.
The sight of the ‘Farmer CM’ dressed in suit, boot and tie - and looking James Bond like according to his admirers on their social media handles - was totally different from the image of a workmanlike CM that Edappadi had assiduously built in his first two years and more in office. It seemed the time had come then to take off to greener pastures which no Tamil Nadu CM had undertaken in at least the last two decades. There was always talk of shifting Jaya abroad for treatment in Texas or Singapore but, perhaps, she never recovered sufficiently for undertaking an air ambulance journey.
While the MoUs on FDI are something that governments have to seek in a very competitive atmosphere in which the likes of Telangana are busy promoting themselves as investment destinations, what impressed was the range of industries from healthcare to electric-driven automobiles that the CM visited. A prominent Indian diaspora forum's founder confided that he found the CM very receptive when the benefits of latest technology were explained to him and that he had a competent set of executives who were preparing to take the best suggestions with a promise to try and implement them in Tamil Nadu, including in agriculture and dairy farming.
The spectacle of the CM standing next to Elon Musk's red Tesla was the highlight of his visit to the Bay Area, which might just trigger a greater movement to electric traction as we have just seen a bit of it in the State running a few buses in Chennai. The city must pursue the idea of public transportation buses run on batteries while inter-city could be on hybrid fuel-run vehicles as charging stations across cities may be too tall an order. But more of
that later. It is the CM’s ability to listen to and understand technology that could be a big boon for a state still holding the tag of India’s Detroit, although the original Detroit changed considerably with the dip in US automobile manufacturers’ fortunes.
The transformation of the accidental but not reluctant chief minister from the west of the state to a focused single point master of his party and head of the government would not have been complete without his party winning enough seats in the Assembly election in 2019 to keep a working majority in the Assembly. It was Palaniswami’s strategy to focus more on the Assembly seats than Parliament that enabled the survival of his government. In that sense he has shown himself to be the master of his own destiny even if he inherited the Jaya legacy of seats won in 2016.
(R. Mohan is the Resident Editor of the Chennai and Tamil Nadu editions of Deccan Chronicle)
