Jayalalithaa Jayaram[a] (24 February 1948 – 5 December 2016) was an Indian actress and politician who served five terms as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, for over fourteen years between 1991 and 2016. From 1989 she was the general secretary of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), a Dravidian party whose cadre revered her as their Amma (mother) and Puratchi Thalaivi (revolutionary leader), among other honorifics.
| J Jayalalithaa | |
|---|---|
| ஜெ ஜெயலலிதா | |
 |
Jayalalithaa first came into prominence as a leading film actor in the mid 1960s. Though she had entered the profession very reluctantly, only upon the urging of her mother to help support the family, Jayalalithaa worked prolifically. She appeared in 140 films from 1961 to 1980, primarily in the Tamil, Telugu and Kannada film industries. Jayalalithaa received praise for her versatility as an actor and for her dancing skills. Among her frequent co-stars was M. G. Ramachandran, or MGR, a Tamil cultural icon who leveraged his immense popularity with the masses into a successful political career. In 1982, when MGR was serving his second term as chief minister, Jayalalithaa joined the AIADMK, the party MGR founded. Her political rise was rapid; within a few years she was made AIADMK propaganda secretary and was elected to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's Parliament. After MGR's death in 1987, Jayalalithaa proclaimed herself his political heir and, having fought off the faction headed by Janaki Ramachandran, MGR's widow, emerged as the sole leader of the AIADMK. Following the 1989 election, she'became Leader of the Oppositon to the DMK government headed by Karunanidhi, her bête noire.
In 1991 Jayalalithaa became chief minister, Tamil Nadu's youngest, for the first time. She earned a reputation for a punishing work ethic and for centralising state power among a coterie of bureaucrats; her council of ministers, whom she often shuffled around, were largely ceremonial in nature. Despite an official salary of only a rupee a month, Jayalalithaa indulged in public displays of wealth, culminating in a lavish wedding for her foster son in Madras in 1995. In the 1996 election, the AIADMK was nearly wiped out at the hustings; Jayalalithaa herself lost her seat. The new Karunanidhi government quickly filed several corruption cases against her, and she had to spend time in jail. Her fortunes revived in the 1998 general election, as the AIADMK became a key component of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's government; her withdrawal of support toppled it and triggered another general election just a year later.
The AIADMK returned to power in 2001, although Jayalalithaa was personally disbarred from contesting due to the corruption cases. Within a few months of her taking oath as chief minister, in September 2001, she was disqualified from holding office, and forced to cede the chair to her staunch loyalist O. Panneerselvam. Upon her acquittal six months later, Jayalalithaa returned as chief minister to complete her term. Her government was noted for its ruthlessness; midnight arrests of political opponents abound. The unpopularity of these moves—the AIADMK scored a duck in the 2004 general election—forced her to reverse them, though she was able to contain the DMK's victory margin in the 2006 assembly election.
In the 2011 assembly election, the Jayalalithaa-led AIADMK and its allies routed the ruling, scandal-tainted DMK's alliance. Sworn in as chief minister for the fourth time, her government embarked on an ambitious programme of social welfare and development. However, three years into her tenure, a trial court convicted her in a disproportionate assets case in September 2014, rendering her disqualified to hold office. After eight months, which included a twenty-day stint in jail, Jayalalithaa was acquitted of all charges by the Karnataka High Court and once again sworn-in as chief minister in May 2015. In the 2016 assembly election, she became the first Tamil Nadu chief minister since MGR in 1984 to be voted back into office. That September, she fell severely ill and, following a 75-day period of hospitalisation,she died on 5 December 2016 after failing to recover from a cardiac arrest.
