She knows what she is talking about. For, she has lived in it. When she says ``reinstate that bureaucrat'', ah well, it speaks a great deal about her definition of bureaucratic freedom: elastic servility in service of the goddess. When banished Bezbaruah rhymes with bribe in her ballad against corruption, you are cordially invited to revisit Jayadom: a political Ruritania where size did matter the size of the cutouts; the size of thewedding, the size of the shoe collection, the size of wealth. So, when Jayalalitha asks her party office manager to write a letter to the Prime Minister's principal secretary about the ethics of governance, it is a national obligation to wake up to the very idea of ethic.

Perhaps it is the idea of Jayalalitha that matters more here. Born out of the great Dravidian kitsch, she has perfected the art of Politics Spectacular. In Jayadom, politics was for your eyes only, and, invariably, it was subordinated to the ruler's feet. She was the magnanimous mother to the foster son. And she was retribution's political equivalent of Godzilla.

Though she hated the fourth estate, she really loved real estate. Though she dreaded to be investigated, she was happy to be the inquisitor. She was the rarest of rebels -- truly, the Dravidian dissent's end-of-the-century mutation. But Jayadom was too enormous to last. When it burst, the remains of her raj only magnified the moral of misgovernance, or, overgovernance: when youare bloated with hubris, you are bound to burst. When she came back, she came with a baggage of corruption charges. She joined the BJP coalition with that baggage. The size of that baggage could have only been challenged by some of those earlier cutouts. Ideally, going by the Indian political tradition, a stake in Delhi should have freed her from that inherited burden. It didn't happen. Actually, nothing happened -- not even Karunanidhi, not even Cauvery. If foster power cannot make things happen, what else can you do but threaten to break the power? Jayalalitha is doing that -- and how!

By bringing the ethics of the erstwhile Jayadom to Delhi. She wants the idea of coalition to be subordinated to the idea of Jayalalitha. Indraprastha has its own morality code, which today is far from being right wing. Add a dash of Dravidian vaudeville to it, and you get the perfect mix of coalition mortality. Jayalalitha's latest epistolary tantrum is not a tribute to the rage against corruption. Rather, it is a displayof courage and conviction by a political Big Mother for whom nothing matters except her own freedom to wreck, to survive, to avenge, to soar over Tamil Nadu as Tamil Nadu's only leader, without the burden of Karunanidhi or corruption. Jayalalitha can afford to do that. Perhaps the poetic sensibility of Vajpayee deserves a better letter. Vajpayee's freedom should match Jayalalitha's.