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Ramaswamy may take on Vaiko

N Sathiya Moorthy in Madras

Former Supreme Court judge V Ramaswamy, the only constitutional authority whose impeachment was actively considered by Parliament since Independence, has joined the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazagham.

He is likely to be the party candidate against Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazagham general secretary Vaiko in the Sivakasi parliamentary constituency.

Ramaswamy, whose Madras residence is incidentally named 'Coin House', hit the national headlines in 1992-93, when as Supreme Court judge, his impeachment came up before Parliament. The issue related to his days as the chief justice of the Punjab and Haryana high court in Chandigarh.

The comptroller and auditor general had found discrepancies in the accounts relating to the furnishing and carpeting of the chief justice's residence, and also to his wrongfully claiming reimbursements for telephone calls made to his family members in Madras.

After a long-drawn-out legal battle, again, the like of which no incumbent judge of the apex court has been involved in, since Independence, the impeachment motion of Ramaswamy came up before Parliament.

His case in the House, ably argued by lawyer-politician Kapil Sibal, now a Rajya Sabha member of the Congress, Ramaswamy escaped impeachment by inches, when the Congress, under pressure from its AIADMK ally and its own Tamil Nadu unit, voted out the motion.

Ramaswamy is only the second high-ranking judicial officer to have formally joined a political party in Tamil Nadu.

Though many judicial officers, particularly those from the higher judiciary were known to be sympathetic to one political party or the other, the late Justice K N Mudaliar of the Madras high court was the first one of the kind. He joined the AIADMK on retirement, and was made law minister, by MGR.

An officer of the subordinate judiciary, the late E S Venkatesam was likewise a member of the by-now-defunct legislative council in the state, again under MGR.

Others of the ilk like Justice S Mohan, Justice V Ratinavel Pandian and Justice P R Gokulakrishnan are known to be sympathetic to the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham cause, nothing more than heading a commission of inquiry or the like, in the process.

Though Ramaswamy formally joined the AIADMK before party chief J Jayalalitha only yesterday, their association dates back to the days of his impeachment proceedings.

Soon after retirement -- he did not sit on the bench after rejoining duty at the end of forced leave -- Ramaswamy was appointed chairman of the Tamil Nadu Law Commission by Jayalalitha, who was the then chief minister.

Around the time, Ramaswamy was also known to have helped out with Jayalalitha's various legal cases. He was said to be among the legal advisors and liaison men of Jayalalitha at the time, both in Delhi and nearer home in Madras, where he had been a lawyer, first, and judge, later, of the Madras high court.

Controversy, criminal cases, and politics are not new to Ramaswamy, not at least to his family. His father-in-law K Veeraswamy, a former chief justice of the Madras high court, is still facing charges of owning assets disproportionate to his known sources of income, filed at the height of the Emergency, preceded by his forced retirement.

Veeraswamy lost most of the procedural objections he had raised, both in the high court and in the Supreme Court.

As for politics, Ramaswamy's son Sanjay was the Congress legislator from the Sivakasi assembly segment under the parliamentary constituency going by the same name, which his father is tipped to contest now as the AIADMK nominee.

Sanjay Ramaswamy, who has married the sister of film actress Sridevi, shifted allegiance to the AIADMK around the time Jayalalitha was backing his father on the impeachment question.

He later came to informally head a group of six Congress MLAs, whom the media came to dub as belonging to the Congress-J, after the AIADMK chief.

Sanjay's political ambitions ended with the 1996 Lok Sabha elections. Sacked by the Congress along with five other MLAs for their extra-party loyalties to Jayalalitha, when the two parties fell out, he was the AIADMK nominee for the Sivakasi Lok Sabha seat.

The Congress, which had by then patched up with the AIADMK, leading to the formation of the Tamil Maanila Congress, did not protest.

Though he too was swept away by the anti-Jayalalitha wave, Sanjay had a consolation: he polled 113,000 votes, nearly 10,000 votes more than the 104,000 votes polled by Vaiko, then still known as Gopalswamy. Communist Party of India's V Alagiriswamy won the seat, polling 240,000 votes, in the company of the DMK-TMC combine, only to lose to Vaiko in 1998.

Jayalalitha's preference for Ramaswamy for the Sivakasi seat is not without political rationale. On the one hand, Jayalalitha is returning to the 'elitist candidates' concept evolved by AIADMK founder, the late M G Ramachandran for the 1977 elections, which was the first one it contested.

Not only did MGR choose lawyers, doctors and other educated persons as party candidates, but also had the fact mentioned in bold letters, in all campaign material. The idea was to try offset the image of the AIADMK being a party of 'front benchers who throng MGR movies'.

Faced with the ignominy of the pending court cases, some of which are reaching a decisive stage, and also the political charge of her toppling the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government at the Centre, for no good reason, Jayalalitha seems interested in investing her party nominees with some kind of elitist image, which "may have some impact".

Included in the list thus are K Malaiswamy, a former home secretary of the state, and also Dr B P Rajan, a Madras-based dentist, who was the first vice-chancellor of the only medical university in the state, named after MGR.

Malaiswamy, considered close to the family of Sasikala Natarajan, Jayalalitha's live-in confidante, joined the AIADMK last week. He is likely to be fielded against former Union minister and Tamil Maanila Congress leader P Chidambaram, in the latter's native Sivaganga parliamentary constituency.

Dr Rajan joined the party today, and may be fielded from Tiruchendur.

The political reasoning behind choosing these personalities as party nominees matches with the electoral rationale behind such a move.

Malaiswamy, for one, is a Thevar, likely to contest in a constituency dominated by a different sub-sect of the community. This, apart from Chidambaram's popularity, could be his undoing, if the DMK-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance chooses its nominee, accordingly.

Likewise, Tiruchendur constituency is dominated by the Nadar community, from which Dr Rajan comes.

As for Justice V Ramaswamy -- there was another Justice K Ramaswamy, who was both in the Madras high court and the apex court around the same time -- he is a Naidu, a prominent, if not the predominant community in the Sivakasi constituency.

Natives of Andhra Pradesh, the community had migrated to these pockets in the southern districts centuries ago, and its members speak only a corroded version of Telugu at home. Incidentally, Vaiko also hails from the same community.

With Ramaswamy and others joining the AIADMK, the guessing game is on in Madras's media circles, on the next former bureaucrat or academic, who may join the AIADMK, to be fielded for the Lok Sabha polls. Included in the list is the name of former director general of police W I Dawaram, sacked bureaucrats S Inbasagaran and N Dyaneswaran, the last two facing criminal charges in relation to their service under the Jayalalitha regime.

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