Chennai: Every morning, at 3am, the kitchens round the back of the Rajiv Gandhi government general hospital in the southern Indian city of Chennai come to life. Forty cooks light the gas cookers and start sorting 185kg of rice.
At 7am the first of the 4,000 daily customers surge in. Porters, rickshaw drivers, nurses, patients, students, bureaucrats, doctors and itinerant holy men all stand to eat their heavily subsidised meals, priced at no more than 5 rupees (5p) and eaten at ferocious speed with fingers from tin plates.
Everyone, cooks and consumers alike, knows who to thank for their almost free meal: Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu state.
This and 202 other eating places in Chennai, all set up over the last 14 months and all hugely popular, are known as “Amma canteens”. Amma, or mother, is one of the local names for the chief minister. “Great Revolutionary Leader” is another.
The 43-year-old chief cook, A. Malathi, said: “This [canteen] is like a temple for her. We will all vote for her, and so will our families, and so will all the customers.”
On Thursday 55 million people in Tamil Nadu went to the polls in the latest phase of India’s protracted general election, which is being carried out in stages to allow the redeployment of 8 million police and officials around this vast country.
With about half the electorate now having voted, surveys put Narendra Modi, candidate of the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, well ahead of the incumbent Congress party.
But it appears likely the BJP will have to form a coalition to rule and that three regional leaders — all women — could end up playing kingmaker.
In Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa’s party, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), sent about 25 parliamentarians to the 545-seat Lok Sabha, the powerful lower house.
Meanwhile, in the east of India, the mercurial and tough Mamata Banerjee, who overturned decades of Communist rule to take power in West Bengal in 2011, could command even more MPs once the results are known.
Finally, there is the flamboyant, controversial Mayawati Kumari, whose support among those lowest in India’s enduring social hierarchy of castes, has made her chief minister of the vast and poverty-stricken northern state of Uttar Pradesh four times.
Many outside Delhi see the success of such figures as essential for the health of Indian democracy.
“This is a crucial election,” said AR Venkatachalapathy, a respected Tamil Nadu historian, analyst and translator. “It is a referendum on what kind of India the electorate want to have. India has so many interests — cultural, social, religious as well as regional — and all look for democratic expression. That is the nation’s strength.”
But others see these three women, and local leaders with smaller followings, as troublemakers out for short-term advantage.
Banerjee, 59, proved a thorn in the side of the outgoing Congress government, forcing repeated policy U-turns until finally withdrawing from the ruling coalition altogether.
Jayalalithaa brought down a previous BJP administration.
“You have to deal with them. That’s the way it is,” said one senior Congress party official. “But giving them their pound of flesh or two pounds or three or 10 pounds is nauseating.”
Humble origins
Jayalalithaa, Banerjee and Mayawati all came from humble origins to win power in a brutal political environment dominated by men.
Jayalalithaa, 66, was spotted by the hugely popular Tamil politician MG Ramachandran in the early 1970s. After his death, she fought his widow to take control of the AIADMK, and has since battled with a rival party led by a powerful local patriarch and his sons.
A US diplomatic cable, sent by the Chennai consulate in 2009 and later leaked, described Jayalalithaa, a convent school-educated multilingual former film star, as “a consummate autocrat who climbed to the peaks of power on her own drive, intellect, and political acumen”.
Local journalists, who talk of a “climate of fear” induced by constant threats of legal action and harassment by state officials, have described Jayalalithaa as “incredibly tough” with “superb political instincts”.
Banerjee, in West Bengal, has also fought hard. A career politician with four degrees in history and law, she survived assaults by thugs sent by political opponents to eventually win power by channelling local anger against the corrupt, inefficient and repressive Communists. Banerjee has also repeatedly refused to be intimidated by national politicians.
Mayawati, 58, has also had few of the advantages of many of Delhi’s ruling elite. The daughter of a low-ranking government clerk, she is a dalit, from the lowest group of castes, who, despite huge affirmative action programmes in India in recent decades, still face harsh discrimination.
Much criticised for spending huge sums on commemorative parks full of statues of herself across Uttar Pradesh, she is still seen as an icon by many of the poorest there and elsewhere in India.
Jayalalithaa and Mayawati have both had to fight off repeated inquiries into the origins of their apparent wealth. Jayalalithaa hosted a wedding for her foster son which remains one of the most expensive nuptial celebrations ever, and Mayawati’s taste for garlands made of banknotes given by supporters is legendary.
Banerjee, a poet, is however known for her personal austerity.
None appear keen to spend much time in Delhi, two hours flight from Kolkata and three hours from Chennai. All have evolved political systems that mix populism, personality cults and welfarism directed at specific communities which suit local conditions. Many people doubt these attributes could be exported elsewhere in such a varied nation.
“There is a particular regional model [in Tamil Nadu] which basically works and that is why no national party can get a look in,” said N Ram, publisher of the Chennai-based national newspaper, The Hindu.
Modi, the BJP prime ministerial candidate, who is chief minister of Gujarat, claims policies he says have brought better governance and economic growth locally can be applied across the country with equal success.
But this effort to project a regional model on a national scale was unlikely to work because India was far too diverse, said Ram.
Some voters in Chennai seek to get the best of both worlds.
Lajish Ashok, a 34-year-old furniture merchant, said he wanted to see Modi in power in Delhi, because the country needed a strong leader and would vote for Jayalalithaa locally as she was the state’s best hope.
But northern India with its different language, landscape and food remains very distant for most in the city.
On Chennai’s marina beach on Wednesday evening, a 25-year-old photographer named Durai shouted for business at his stand, where customers could have their picture taken with life-size cutouts of film idols against a background of an English country village. The stars are exclusively from local Tamil-language films.
“No Hollywood, no Bollywood, no politicians,” said Durai, as breakers crashed on the dark, dirty sand. “South India is the best.”
— Guardian News & Media Ltd.