COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

The goddess of the flies

Suhasini Haidar in New Delhi

When All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief J Jayalalitha left Madras on April 12, she said her mission was to bring down the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and install an alternative in its place. While the former was accomplished, presumably according to plan within the week, the southern "seismological phenomenon" -- a sobriquet earned after her last visit, when she spoke of a political tremor arising out of her meeting Congress president Sonia Gandhi -- couldn't have known how prolonged and messy the latter was going to get.

"Amma" or "Madam", as she is commonly referred to in political circles, has now been in Delhi for more than 10 days. At the Maurya Sheraton hotel where she has been camping, the lobby bears the brunt of all political events.

When she checked in, a sea of reporters, photographers, and cameramen took over the carpet in the ground floor lobby, and aimed their lenses and mikes at every movement that Jayalalitha made. If she didn't move, that was news too. The frenzy just grew more frenzied, until the fateful hour when the AIADMK supremo went to the President to withdraw support.

"It was just ridiculous," says a Maurya staffer, "The kind of questions we were asked about her -- what does she eat for breakfast, how much laundry she sent for cleaning etc, etc... And then there was this crazy story that her entourage had taken up one entire floor, when in fact she has only checked into one suite and four rooms."

Accordingly stories appeared in the press, detailing how Madam ate just one croissant through the day, followed up by cheese toast in the evening, and that her entire linen had accompanied her from Madras (no wonder she needed to travel with 48 suitcases!), and so on. Funnier tales are swapped amongst the members of the press stationed downstairs, such as the one about a Mahakali puja that Jayalalitha had allegedly undertaken one night, which singed the carpets. Maurya officials firmly deny that story.

To be fair, Madam makes good copy simply because she is so aloof with the press and others. Nobody is allowed up to the 16th floor, where her rooms are, without her permission when she is in residence. And when she moves out to meet everyone from the President to the Congress president, nobody except best pal Sasikala is allowed to remain in her quarters. So that whenever Jayalalitha comes back to the hotel, the entire AIADMK parliamentary party, and hordes from the press are lined up like devotees at the local temple, to get her blessings and comments on the current situation.

On days when things have gone well for Jayalalitha and her new found-friends in the Opposition, such as the day of the nail-biting finish to the confidence vote, the Maurya lobby is radiant with flash-bulbs and video-lights. On others, such as Friday, when it looked like efforts at an alternative government had failed after Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Samajwadi party president Mulayam Singh Yadav locked horns on the shape of the government, there is an "uneasy calm" in the hotel.

On such days, Jayalalitha goes in and out of the hotel, if at all, soundlessly, and doesn't say much to the press. Friday, for example, she stopped only to deliver an ominous "time is running out for us all" warning before adjourning to her rooms.

For now, it is anyone's guess just how long Madam's mission will take, if in fact she will succeed in it at all. It is also hard to predict the shape of the next government, be it Congress in coalition with the so-called third front, or the third front minus the AIADMK plus the Communist Party of India-Marxist minus the Revolutionary Socialist Party, multiplied by their numbers, and divided by their agendas.

But, yes, we do have confirmed reports that Jayalalitha will have idlis with sambharand chutney for breakfast tomorrow...

Tell us what you think of this report