They are, in fact, carefully choreographed calls to the faithful to rally around their leaders.

No one knows this better than J. Jayalalitha, general secretary of the AIADMK. After all wasn't it this woman who had emerged on the Tamil Nadu political stage from a peacock chariot at a public rally in the early '80s?

MGR, the man who played midwife to Jayalalitha's political birth, was a veritable master of the art of building personality cults and Jayalalitha proved to be an adept student of his brand of politics. Two of the rallies she organised in the past have over time assumed almost legendary proportions in the mind of the voter. Each ofthem marked a significant moment in her political progress.

The first was the 1986 World MGR Fans Association meet, during the course of which a bejewelled sceptre was handed over to the frail and ailing MGR. In actual fact, it served to showcase Jayalalitha as his true successor. The other was the 1992 affair organised to mark her first year of chief ministership. The one-kilometre long pandal, done up as a fort, and long queues of party workers filing past their Puratchi Thalaivi, was as much a testimony to her political savvy as her overweening arrogance.

Given this history, it is unlikely that Jayalalitha will not vest great importance in the September 15 rally that the AIADMK is busy organising. The fact that she chose to stage it on the very day of the MDMK rally was a signal that although she may dismiss that party as a ``newcomer'' in Dravida politics she does not take the challenge to her supremacy posed by the MDMK lightly.

She is too sharp a politician not to perceive thepolitical import of Vaiko's gameplan to build his own political equations with the BJP --particularly since the PMK has also chosen to lend its strength to this effort. She clearly understands that the BJP leadership is more than willing to play to the MDMK script. She also cannot be unaware that the DMK -- her chief tormentor -- is watching the rally game with great interest and will do its bit to isolate her as much as it can.

It's not ideological compulsions that are goading the AIADMK and the MDMK into staging these public extravaganzas. It is naked self-interest. Otherwise why would the MDMK, which had earlier told its party cadres to raise pro-Eelam slogans at its rally, be more than ready to scrap them so as to spare Prime Minister Vajpayee, who will be attending it, some embarrassment?

The fact is that the moment the AIADMK-led coalition struck its deals with an Aryan-dominated, Hindi-speaking party like the BJP, they had more or less consigned the Dravida-driven ideals of leaders like Periyar andAnnadurai to the dustbin of history. The great beating of drums to celebrate Anna's birthday come Tuesday will therefore necessarily ring hollow.