For Jothimani S., Sundays, no matter how scorching it is outside, are not for resting. She is on the road in Karur, meeting voters and thanking them. She polled more than 6.9 lakh votes and defeated AIADMK strongman M. Thambidurai with a margin of 4.2 lakh votes. Wherever she goes, women are drawn to her. “Kannu Jothimani, nalla irukkuriya? Makkalakku nalladhu pannipodu, kannu (Dear Jothimani, all well with you? Do good for the people, dear),” women tell her. Jothimani, clad in a blue cotton sari, replies: “Seyyaranunga. Ennaya nambi vote potturukeenga (I will do. You have voted believing in me).” And, she has already begun working on her poll promises, like organising a job fair and solving water issues.
In a state where money and muscle power play a key role in politics, Jothimani's journey stands out. “I learnt every bit of my political lesson only after experiencing it,” says the lone woman Congress MP from Tamil Nadu. She lost her farmer father, Sennimalai, when she was 13, and was raised by her mother, Muthulakshmi. Her father was a Gandhian; her mother, a school dropout, was a woman of principles. Jothimani's politics is rooted in their beliefs. Her tryst with politics began when she was 21 and just out of college. She was moved by the plight of the dalits in her village—Thirumangalam, 35km from Karur. Dalits had to fight the Gounders, the community Jothimani belongs to, for water. Once, a woman collapsed while talking about her water woes to Muthulakshmi. Jothimani realised that only power could resolve the matter, and decided to contest the panchayat union (block) elections in 1996.
But, her relatives opposed her decision. They told her that politics was not for women from a good background. But, Jothimani was “stubborn”. Even as her relatives stayed away, her mother said: “If you fall or rise, it is all yours. No one is responsible for anything in your life anymore. If you earn a bad name by being in public life, you and I cannot live together thereafter.”
Jothimani has kept those words close to her heart, and strives to be a true people's representative. She contested the polls on a Congress ticket and won. Her priority was to lay a pipeline in the dalit colony in her village. What was to be a 15-day project took two years to resolve, she says. “That is when I understood power alone cannot help. However, I earned the goodwill of the people in K. Paramathi Union,” recalls Jothimani. That goodwill earned her one more term.
In 2004, when Rahul Gandhi took on a more active role in the party, she found a mentor in him. At the party's talent hunt programme in Andhra Pradesh, she wrote down her suggestions on a piece of paper and gave it to Rahul. He read it and asked former Union minister of state Jitendra Singh to guide her. “Rahul Gandhi is an amazing listener,” she says. “He wanted all of us, whom he had mentored, to travel along with him. The Congress and India should understand his visionary views.”
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As a Youth Congress general secretary in 2009-2010, Jothimani worked in the northeast and in Kerala. She soon evolved as a leader in Karur. In 2011, she contested from the Karur assembly seat. “I lost, but that was a learning,” she says. In 2014, she contested from the Karur parliamentary seat, and lost. But, that did not weaken her commitment to politics, which, she says, went beyond winning an election. “To me, democracy means power in the hands of the last man in the country,” she says. “I want to bring back people's confidence in the political system.”
Jothimani is a writer, too. Her first short story was selected as one of the best short stories by a Tamil weekly in 1996. She wrote about her experience of bringing water to the dalit locality in Neer Pirakkum Mun. While she draws inspiration from the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Periyar, Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar, she will always live by the words of her mother, whom she lost a year ago.
Jothimani S.
Age 43
Party: Congress
Constituency: Karur, Tamil Nadu
Vote share: 63.06%
Education: MA, MPhil