The rest of the country may be caught up with Anna Hazare and his hunger strike in the capital, but in Vellur, the village where former telecom minister A Raja was born and spent his formative years, it is of little consequence. The people here are more interested in whether the Dalit boy who became a minister in Delhi would come out of jail or not.
At Raja?s house, his nephew Tamil Selvan and niece Bhakya are defensive when you ask them about their now uncle. ?No one really knows the truth about the scam, and everyone is just hellbent on criticising him over something that he has nothing to do with,? says 16-year-old Bhakya ingenuously.
Selvan, older and perhaps wiser, strikes a different note. ?My uncle studied in government schools and colleges and came up through sheer merit, despite being a Dalit and facing hardships. Look at Perambalur now. We have a government arts college (the Bharatidasa University) a medical college, nursing college (Dhanalakshmi Srinivas Nursing Institute), several government-run polytechnics. We also have an SEZ nearby, all after my uncle became minister,? he says. Selvan has perhaps unwittingly put his finger on the one explanation about how corruption gets deep-rooted in a system where even a scam of the magnitude of the 2G spectrum sale allocation cannot shake popular support. An explanation which the middle class needs to heed amid all the candlelight vigils.
Quite simply, Raja may have made thousands of crores through graft, but he also passed on some of it to the people in his area through developmental schemes. What was just an up-country district attached to the bigger town of Tiruchirapalli now boasts of more educational institutions than many of the bigger districts around. Despite being in jail, Raja, it seems, had an important role to play in the selection of the DMK candidate from Perambalur: Prabhakaran, the owner of a gas agency allotted when Raja was minister.
The 2G scam on its own is of little consequence in these elections. As Shekhar, a schoolteacher in Perambalur, says, ?All of these people are corrupt, but at least the Kalaignar (referring to DMK chief M Karunanidhi) government developed the area.?