Eroding the dignity of Jayalalithaa's memories

On December 20, P. Vetrivel, a former MLA and member of the AIADMK party, convened a press meet and released a 20-second video clip purportedly showing former Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalithaa lying on a hospital bed shortly before she died on December 5, 2016. Since that day, the affairs of the AIADMK have been in tatters – an inconvenience they’ve been forced to confront twice over, both when Jayalalithaa’s constituency, R.K. Nagar, had by-polls to elect their next representative.

A major rift within the party itself meant that there were those within and without who suspected Jayalalithaa may not have died a natural death, as the currently dominant AIADMK faction – to which Vetrivel belongs – has insisted. The same faction is led by T.T.V. Dinakaran, who is former Jayalalithaa aide V.K. Sasikala’s nephew. Vetrivel’s new video, which he said was made by Sasikala with Jayalalithaa’s consent, tries to allay these fears by showing that the former leader was really at a hospital being treated for diabetes and kidney problems. This happened even as voting began in R.K. Nagar in the morning on December 21.

No Tamil news channel seems to have heeded the Election Commission’s directive to not air the video clip, which itself arrived only four+ hours after Vetrivel’s press meet concluded. While some people have tried to poke holes in the video, especially focusing on how palm trees are visible outside Jayalalithaa’s room in the hospital when her treatment was widely publicised to have happened on the seventh floor, news channels aired it all day yesterday.

The clip shows Jayalalithaa on a large bed, unmoving, in a gown. Her facial features aren’t apparent. Her left leg is visible outstretched but her right leg isn’t. In her left hand, there’s a cup of some liquid that she brings to her mouth once and drinks through a straw. It’s quite a sad sight to behold.

When Jayalalithaa died, the pall of sorrow that hung over Chennai was palpable. Even functionaries of the DMK, which has been the AIADMK’s principal opponent for decades, were shaken and paid heartfelt tributes to a woman they called a ‘worthy opponent’. Although she’d run an opaque, pro-business government and centralised a majority of its decision-making, her rule was marked by many popular social development schemes. There’s no bigger testimony to her leadership than the blind, self-serving hutch the AIADMK has devolved to become without her.

To see a woman considered to have been tactful, shrewd and graceful when she lived depicted after her death in a way that minimised her agency and highlighted an implicit sense of distress and decay is nauseating¹. Jayalalithaa was known to have actively constructed and maintained her appearances in public and on TV as characterising a certain persona. With Sasikala’s and Vetrivel’s choices, this personality has been broken – which makes Vetrivel’s claim that Jayalalithaa consented to being filmed, and for that video to be released to TV channels, triply suspect.

Jayalalithaa, when alive, took great care to make herself appear a certain way – including going all the way to issuing statements only to select members of the press, those whose words she could control. What would she have said now with the image of a weakened, unsustaining Jayalalithaa being flashed everywhere?

There’s little doubt that Dinakaran and Vetrivel wanted to manipulate R.K. Nagar’s voters by releasing the clip barely a day before voting was to begin. Most people recognise that their faction within the AIADMK shouldn’t have released the video now but much earlier and with proof of the footage’s legitimacy to the Commission of Inquiry, which has been investigating her death.

Then again, considering what has been caught on camera, consuming it has been nothing short of engaging in voyeurism. So the video shouldn’t have been shot in the first place, especially since there’s no proof of Jayalalithaa’s having consented to being filmed as well as to being shown thus on TV beyond what Vetrivel told the press about what Sasikala had told him.

For this alone, I hope the people of R.K. Nagar reject Dinakaran’s faction and its exploitative politics. But more importantly, I hope journalists recognise how seriously they’ve erred in showing Jayalalithaa the way they did – and helped Dinakaran achieve what he’d wanted to in the first place.

1. This also happened with Eman Ahmed.

Featured image credit: Nandhinikandhasamy/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.