When it comes to ruling and keeping her men in line, J Jayalalthaa is very much similar to Sonia Gandhi. Or maybe even a bit ahead.
When it comes to ruling and keeping her men in line, J Jayalalthaa is very much similar to Sonia Gandhi.
Or maybe even a bit ahead.
She has chosen O Panneerselvam to run the Tamil Nadu government who broke into tears while taking oath as the chief minister of the state, and who, as everybody knows, is a robot to be remote-controlled by Amma.
It was in the year 2001 when Jayalalithaa experimented with a remote controlled chief minister, it was just for a little time. The same Panneerselvam was her robot and she toyed with him easily from the confines of her Chennai home.
Soon, she returned to power and everything was back to normal.
Perhaps, Sonia took a cue from there and chose Manmohan Singh in 2004 when she allegedly couldn’t surpass her son Rahul Gandhi’s diktat and sit on the UPA throne at the centre. But, looking at the history, we will find that Congress and many other parties have had their fair share of experience in running a proxy through a robot.
In 1991, when Sharad Pawar, then Maharashtra chief minister, joined PV Narsimha Rao government and became a central minister, he handed over power to Sudhakarrao Naik. However, he had the guts to announce that he held the remote control of the Maharashtra government.
But it just did not work. As Sify puts it in an article, Naik regularly clashed with Pawar especially over taking on the Mumbai underworld and their tussle is known more for the horrific 1992-93 Mumbai riots where the State machinery completely broke down.
Rao sent Pawar packing back to Mumbai and Naik became a footnote in Maharashtra’s political history.
Similarly, Gujarat chief minister Hitendra Desai was pulled in two different directions by Congress leaders Indira Gandhi and Morarji Desai. That also ended badly and saw regular communal tensions in the years to come.
Bal Thackeray too believed in supremacy and tried controlling two subsequent chief ministers. both Manohar Joshi and Narayan Rane. It led to a broke down of governance and the voters never forgave Sena for that. As a result, the lacklustre Congress-NCP got 15 years and Sena finished a lowly fourth in the 2009 Assembly elections.
In Bihar, Laloo Prasad Yadav comfortably remote controlled his own wife Rabri Devi to oblivion.
Rabri and Laloo sank in 2005 and they have been out of power in the State for 9 years and are nowhere in the Centre too. Currently, former chief minister and JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar is trying to rule through current CM Jiten Ram Manjhi.
And well, we all know how history is going to treat Mnamohan Singh.
The jail term that Jayalalithaa is going to face is a long time and Panneerselvam better build a spine during that.
Else, history won’t be kind to him to for we have had our fair share of robot rules.
And we are so done with robots now.
