It was a matter of waiting for the inevitable. At last, Ms J. Jayalalithaa has come to an understanding with the Bharatiya Janata Party that the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam will fight the Lok Sabha elections on the BJP’s side. From the BJP’s point of view, the calculations have been neat enough. The two have been eyeing each other for quite a while now, in spite of the fact that it was the AIADMK’s withdrawal in 1998 that was behind the fall of the 13-month-old Vajpayee government. But as Ms Jayalalithaa has said, the meaning of politics is flexibility. Initially rather arch, then more open, the revived attraction between the AIADMK and the BJP was one of the causes behind the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s growing disaffection with the BJP before it finally broke ties with the NDA. Just as the BJP had earlier found the DMK its ally when the AIADMK turned its back, it now has the AIADMK in place of the DMK. If politics means flexibility, in India it has come to mean little more than musical chairs. No chairs are ever empty. Since ideology is no longer an issue, presumably governance is. Evidently, the choice of partners had nothing to do with that either. Alliances are not forged on the basis of comparative capabilities of governance.

It is interesting that Ms Jayalalithaa’s recent policies have proven how much closer she is to the BJP ideologically than the DMK and Mr M. Karunanidhi. Her law banning conversions must have brought her close to the BJP Hindutva hardliners’ hearts, although belief has nothing to do with it. Wooing the Hindu vote is a winning formula: this must be the lesson that Ms Jayalalithaa, ever flexible, gained from the BJP’s series of victories, beginning Gujarat. She has temple projects, has attended a yagna, and has generally established her credentials. But the professed reason for her joining hands with the BJP is simpler: she cannot bear to have a person with foreign origins as a possible prime minister of India. Whatever the Congress’s assessment about the acceptability of its prime ministerial candidate, the AIADMK chief’s statement is merely the veneer over a complicated series of calculations and bargains. It also trivializes politics further — strange reasons for partnerships are replacing the vacuum created by the disappearance of ideology. It is to be expected that the BJP knows what it is doing, since it has earlier experienced Ms Jayalalithaa at very close quarters. But it should be remembered that the BJP itself was not so sure of its power at the time. This time the cement of power is stronger, on both sides.