Jayalalitha Jayaram

Jayalalitha Jayaram (born February 24, 1948, near Mysore, India—died December 5, 2016, Chennai) was an Indian film actress, politician, and government official who long served as the leader of the All India Dravidian Progressive Federation (All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam; AIADMK), a political party based in Tamil Nadu state, India. Known simply by the name Jayalalitha, she served three terms (1991–96, 2002–06, and 2011–14) as chief minister (head of government) of Tamil Nadu.

She was born into a Brahman family near the southern Indian city of Mysore (now in Karnataka state). Her father died when she was young, and her mother, a film actress, moved the family first to Bangalore (Bengaluru) and then to Madras (now Chennai). Her family’s poor financial conditions forced her to quit her studies after completing secondary school. Although she had acted in a film while still in school, she now pursued that vocation full-time, becoming a highly successful star and acting in some 130 films between 1964 and 1980. Her success in the movie industry was in large part the result of her association with the iconic Tamil-language actor Maruthur Gopala Ramachandran (popularly known as MGR), with whom she made more than two dozen movies. MGR was also a politician, who founded the AIADMK in 1972 and from 1977 to 1987 was the chief minister of Tamil Nadu.

It is unclear to what extent MGR may have mentored Jayalalitha politically, but she joined the AIADMK in 1982 and quickly rose through the party ranks. In 1983 she was made the propaganda secretary of the party, and a year later she won a seat in the Rajya Sabha (upper chamber of the Indian parliament). Following the death of MGR in late 1987, the AIADMK underwent a split, with MGR’s wife, Janaki Ramachandran, and Jayalalitha each heading competing factions of the party. The rift was healed in a few years, however, after the two groups had merged back together and Janaki Ramachandran had left politics. Jayalalitha became the leader of the party.

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In Tamil Nadu Jayalalitha’s AIADMK faced a bitter rival in the Dravidian Progressive Federation (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam; DMK). In 1989 Jayalalitha was elected to the state legislative assembly, where she led the opposition to the then-ruling DMK. An incident in the chamber, where she was allegedly physically and verbally assaulted by DMK members, steeled her resolve to bring the AIADMK back to power. In the 1991 state assembly elections, the party won an overwhelming victory, and Jayalalitha began her first term as chief minister, heading a coalition government with the Indian National Congress (Congress Party). Her tenure was controversial, however, marred by allegations of corruption and misappropriation of official funds. In 1995 an extravagant wedding that she had organized for her foster son, alleged to have cost millions of dollars, sparked harsh criticism from the media.

The AIADMK lost the 1996 state assembly elections, and the DMK government, back in power, filed some 40 corruption cases against Jayalalitha between 1996 and 2001. She was even imprisoned for a month in 1996, after a raid by authorities seized a large quantity of jewelry, clothing, and shoes from her home. In 1998 Jayalalitha brought the AIADMK into the national coalition government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), attempting to exploit the indispensable position regional parties had assumed in national coalition politics. After her unsuccessful attempt to pressure the NDA to dismiss the DMK government in Tamil Nadu, however, she withdrew AIADMK support from the NDA in 1999, which led to the collapse of that government.

In 2001 the AIADMK again won the Tamil Nadu assembly elections. Jayalalitha, however, was initially barred from returning to the post of chief minister because of a pending court case against her for allegedly acquiring property illegally. The state’s High Court soon acquitted her of the charges, and she began her second term as chief minister in March 2002. That tenure, less controversial than the first one, included a range of administrative measures that her government initiated, which included banning the sale of lottery tickets and restricting the sale of tobacco near educational institutions; authorities in the state also hunted down and in 2004 killed the notorious bandit, poacher, and smuggler Veerappan.

Jayalalitha again sided with the NDA in the 2004 national parliamentary elections, with disastrous results, as the AIADMK lost every seat it contested in the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament). The AIADMK also lost the 2006 Tamil Nadu assembly elections, in which the party had been forced to ally itself with smaller state political parties. The AIADMK, in alliance with a number of leftist parties for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, did gain back most of the seats it had lost five years earlier, Jayalalitha being one of the winners.

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That alliance served her well again, as the party was victorious in the 2011 assembly elections, and she returned for a third term as chief minister. Jayalalitha continued to be dogged by more corruption charges stemming from her first term, however, and in September 2014 she was convicted on some of them and sentenced to four years in prison. She relinquished her post to O. Panneerselvam (or Paneerselvam), who had served as chief minister in 2001–02 when Jayalalitha was not able to hold the office.