Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

Much depends on whether Benazir and Jayalalitha are prepared to distance themselves from their respective companions

The Pudukottai by-election is a pointer to where thing are headed. Where, but eight months ago, the AIADMK was routed in this assembly segment by a margin of 43,000 votes, the margin of defeat has now been cut to a mere 12,000. This notwithstanding the fact that there was then no rebel AIADMK, that the PMK and Janata Dal were not aligned with the DMK as this time round, that the Congress was then but not now in alliance with the AIADMK, and that Jayalalitha herself campaigned in Pudukottai in 1996 where ill-health prevented her at the last moment from going to the support of her candidate in 1997.

The DMK made her prosecution for corruption the central plank of its campaign; the AIADMK made her persecution at the hands of the DMK government the central plank of its campaign. The moral victory was Jayalalitha's even if the seat went to the DMK. The AIADMK is catching up so fast with the DMK-TMC combine that by the next by-election that restoration of the normal balance of power in Tamil Nadu as between the two principal Dravidian parties is only to expected.

In Pakistan, similarly, it is not any great accretion in Nawaz Shari's vote that has accounted for his victory but the large number of PPP voters who preferred to simply stew away from the polls. After all, if Benazir was dismissed under the Eighth Amendment for corruption, Nawaz was also dismissed under the same Eighth Amendment for corruption. What, then, was there to choose between the two for the voter for whom corruption was the issue? Unsurprisingly, the turnout was abysmally low.

Should Benazir hit her stride -- and that remains, for the present, a big speculative IF -- the PPP voter would decide to go vote and, therefore the results of future Pakistan by-elections could be not dissimilar to the signals from Pudukottai.

Much depends on whether Benazir and Jayalalitha are prepared to distance themselves from their respective companions. Jayalalitha has announced that the has nothing future to do with Sasikala and her kin. The claim lacks credibility but she seems at least to have dumped Sasikala's relatives, such as the nephew Jayalalitha adopted on the eve of his celebrated wedding in September 1995, the multi-million jamboree which was the proximate cause of her electoral defeat.

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