The unforgettable moment: When Vajpayee touched the feet of Chinnapillai

Chinnapillai of Tamil Nadu was instrumental in empowering over 60,000 women who were later formed into groups called Kalanjiyam with the help of the NGO Dhan Foundation.

Madurai:Tamil Nadu's temple city, Madurai has remembered former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as a very humble person who touched the feet of a woman in 2001.

A function in Vigyan Bhavan in Delhi, a village lady by name P. Chinnapillai was to be awarded the Streeshakthi Award for her work in empowering rural women. She hailed from a small village called Pulliseri in Madurai district.

At the time of giving the award, Vajpayee stunned the world by bending down and touching the feet of Chinnapillai for her contribution to women's empowerment through a non-governmental organisation Dhan Foundation.

The very name Atal Bihari Vajpayee conjures up memories of a decent politician, a suave and skilful parliamentarian, an RSS swayamsevak, a poet, an orator, a BJP leader, loved by friends and foes alike. He had several firsts: the first BJP Prime Minister, the first non-Congress PM who lasted his full term, the first Indian minister to have addressed the UN General Assembly in Hindi; the first BJP leader respected by rivals such as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi.

A member of Parliament 10 times and a member of Rajya Sabha twice, Vajpayee (1924-2018) is still remembered as the gentle and soft face of the BJP. Coinciding with Christmas, his birthday we celebrate with warmth on the cold December day is an occasion to take a ride down Madurai lane, a seemingly unlikely avenue to remember a leader born in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh. Indeed there are emotional memories about Madurai in Tamil Nadu, which connect with the Hero of Kargil War, no less grand than those involving Mahatma Gandhi.

Rewind the clock to 1999

It was a venue in metro with all trappings of an elitist ambience; swanky, stylish building; sophisticated people strutting about, dressed in their glossy best, refined and urbane words tripping gently from the tongue; a far cry from a village tucked away in a remote corner of the country, dusty, desolate and deserted, where the people, coarse, unlettered and ghettoized, steeped in penury and ignorance, lead a desperate life.

It was Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi brimming with festive spirit and happy-go-lucky air. The occasion was a function held by the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development to distribute what was then called the Stree Shakti Puraskar Awards to the deserving women who were reputed to have achieved the feat of women empowerment.

Against the high-voltage atmosphere on the dais were dignitaries in pomp and regalia. Prime Minister AB Vajpayee was distributing the awards as the announcer kept on reciting the names one by one. The turn for the woman from Madurai came. All eyes riveted on her, the woman ascended the step to the dais; in her fifties and in the simplest cotton saree, earlobes dropping emptily with no jewel adorning them, face, brows and forehead furrowed and smelling of rustic pristine purity. The little over a four-foot-tall woman had been added to the list of achievers after thorough official scrutiny.

For a splitting second, the PM, the topmost symbol of power in the country, was staring into the innocent, guileless eyes of the woman, the symbol of the bottom rung of the society. As he had, about three decades ago, seen the woman PM as Durga, the Goddess of Power, so now he glimpsed ‘Shakti’ (another term for Goddess of Power) in this most fragile village woman though they were far apart in age, education, social status, power et al. Then, what happened…. hey presto, the top representative of political power came down and reached for the feet of the representative of the hoi polloi.

The audience at that moment and the media the next day (social media were just in the womb of time then) were all taken by surprise. Of course, so was the woman P.Chinnapillai who, shaking with disbelief at the magical moment, face blushing, if aged, tried to lift Vajpayee, in the midst of a thundering ovation the hall was reverberating with.

As the famous phrase goes, on that fine day the woman woke up to name and fame.

“It was the biggest boon in my life that the PM touched my feet,” said she in a recent interview with ETV Bharat.

Close on the heels of the most surprising event, media persons made a beeline for Chinnapillai’s hut in the village Pillucheri near Appan Tirupathi in Madurai – a hut whose doorstep is too low to enter without knocking your head against the top.

Recalling the most unbelievable incident still fresh in her memory, nearly 20 years on, she said, “Then someone (who knew Tamil) at the stage whispered in my ears that the PM saw in me an embodiment of Goddess Durga and hence that kind of obeisance.” As she said these words, she seemed to be having goosebumps all over her body as she had 20 years ago.

Great leaders cast aside the yawning gap in age, education and status when it comes to recognizing the glory of the seemingly small people as did Mahatma Gandhi, who was in his forties when he bowed his head to and got his activist inspiration from the indomitable spirit of Thilllaiyadi Valliammai, the teen girl, who laid down her life during the satyagraha in South Africa. It was Madurai, by the way, which changed his attire to the simple groin cloth that earned him the moniker of a ‘half-naked fakir.’

What had Chinnapillai done to the point of a PM going down as if seeking blessings from an elderly woman, a junior by age? This generation of digital natives awash with social media waves must know it.

Chinnapillai, 70, hailing from the family of farm labourers at Kallanthiri near Madura and married at the age of 12, turned a social activist in 1990s and launched a crusade against poverty, dowry, women’s slavery, usury, and drinking in villages. Though not schooled in any institution, she had learnt a lot from the dismal ground reality in her village. It was out of her keen awareness of the social evils rampant more in villages that the Kalanjiam Microcredit Movement was born, thanks to the help of the DHAN, an NGO.

The movement put up a multi-pronged fight against usury and instilled in the women’s minds a will to triumph over all heavy odds. She was a catalyst in the self-help movement that caught the fancy of the rural women and went on a campaign spree to create awareness among the villages for months on end in the villages spanning not only Tamil Nadu but also 14 States including Karnataka, Andhra, Odisha, Pondicherry.

She has done a yeoman’s service to the cause of women’s emancipation and people’s freedom from exploitation and yet there are miles to go, she said. “Though not a total solution to all social problems has been achieved, we have made considerable progress in our mission. We have retrieved lakhs of families from poverty and ensured decent life for them,” she said, adding, “We have also taken measures to eradicate drinking and save addicted men.”

As the years pass, age seems to be taking its toll on her. Yet Chinnapillai’s spirit is still indomitable, as evident from her saying, “In our Kalanjiam movement, I still attend meetings. I want more women to take charge of the movement and carry on our mission. Moreover, I have also asked the government to give a job to each family.”

It was she who, through a relentless fight, got her people’s huts replaced with concrete houses. She is now living in a small house, somehow managing to keep the wolf from the door.

However, the house has a roof and walls that seem to have outlived their utility, cracks exposing the chinks in the armour of safety. It is the house in which the recipient of Padmashri award and Avvaiyar award is living, not at all giving up on her ideals and awesome activism that had cast a powerful spell on the now remembered BJP leader!