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India Official Found Guilty of Corruption India Official Found Guilty of Corruption
(about 3 hours later)
NEW DELHI — A charismatic former actress who entered politics and became the top elected official in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu was sentenced Saturday to four years in jail after a court found her guilty of corruption in a case filed 18 years ago. NEW DELHI — The powerful chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa Jayaram, will be forced to step down after a court convicted her of corruption and sentenced her to four years in prison on Saturday, an unprecedented ruling against a sitting chief minister.
The official, Jayalalitha Jayaram, will have to step down as chief minister of Tamil Nadu after the court in Bangalore found her guilty of possessing wealth disproportionate to her known sources of income. She also will be disqualified from running in elections for six years. During Ms. Jayaram’s first term in office in the 1990s, she was accused of having assets — nearly $11 million — that far exceeded her declared income, which she stated was just a token one rupee a month. She was tried under the Prevention of Corruption Act, but the case languished in court for 18 years before Saturday’s ruling.
In addition to the jail sentence, the court fined Ms. Jayalalitha, who is known by her first name, 250 million rupees, or about $4.7 million. She will seek bail from a higher court, the prosecutor’s office said. “The long arm of the law has at last caught up with her,” said A. R. Venkatachalapathy, a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu.
Indian politicians are rarely convicted on corruption charges, and even more rarely end up spending time in jail. Ms. Jayalalitha’s supporters say the case is a conspiracy to discredit her. For those familiar with Ms. Jayaram, 66, the reversal of fortune was unexpected. She is one of a small number of heavyweight regional leaders in India, a former actress who rode into office on the coattails of a male benefactor and then consolidated her power.
Security was tight outside the court, with more than 5,000 police officers and paramilitary troops forming a security cordon around the building. Roads were blocked about a mile from the court to keep away Ms. Jayalalitha’s supporters, who threatened to hold protests against the verdict. The assets she is accused of accumulating, including 2,000 acres of land, 30 kilograms of gold and 12,000 saris, according to Indian news reports, tell the story of a leader whose tenure was marked by profligacy and panache.
Across Tamil Nadu, shopkeepers closed their stores and the police were on alert, as Ms. Jayalalitha’s followers gathered outside her home in the heart of Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu and formerly known as Madras. But there were no immediate reports of violence. In 1996, Ms. Jayaram, who is known by her followers as Amma, or mother, was accused of using state funds to pay for an elaborate wedding for her foster son that featured acrobats, horsemen, shrines with her image in the place of Hindu deities and 20,000 police officers on special duty. She has maintained that the bride’s family paid for the wedding, local news media reported.
Ms. Jayalalitha, 66, was accused in 1996 of amassing a fortune of 660 million rupees, or about $11 million, at a time when she was taking a token 1 rupee as her monthly salary. The deftness with which she grabbed power and the strength with which she wielded it in India’s male-dominated political machinery left many amazed. She has also been a key ally for aspiring national leaders, including the current prime minister, Narendra Modi. Though their interactions have been cordial, she notably skipped his inauguration.
Court cases move so slowly through India’s judicial system that decades can go by without a verdict. Subramanian Swamy, a former minister and a member of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, initiated the corruption case against Ms. Jayaram in 1996. In 2001, during her second term in office, she was convicted in a separate land-acquisition case and forced to give up power for several months. She installed a successor widely seen as a figurehead and regained power in 2002.
Ms. Jayalalitha entered politics in the early 1980s after a successful film career in southern India that included appearances in nearly 150 movies. She has had three stints as chief minister of Tamil Nadu, including her latest one, which began in May 2011. It is a tactic she may use again to maintain influence within her party, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.
“Whoever Amma nominates will be the chief minister, and that person will be completely remote-controlled,” Professor Venkatachalapathy said. “If she’s not on the scene, that’s a very different issue. If she continues to be in prison, her control over the party and the government cannot be absolute.”
Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party could use Ms. Jayaram’s absence to try to make inroads in a state that has traditionally resisted the national parties in favor of local politicians, Professor Venkatachalapathy said.
Thousands of Ms. Jayaram’s supporters arrived at the court in Bangalore on Saturday to await the verdict, and the police blocked off some roads. As word of the verdict spread, shopkeepers in Chennai, about 200 miles to the east, closed their stores, and fights broke out between her supporters and detractors, The Hindu, an Indian newspaper, said.
“We could die for Amma,” said Raman Ramamurthy, 56, a supporter who was at the court on Saturday. “How will we survive in Tamil Nadu without her?”