The political debate on Tamil Nadu’s streets today is centred around two questions: how long will the EPS-OPS merger hold and the AIADMK government headed by Edappadi Palaniswami last? What is the principal opposition party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) going to do now? In the 234-member Tamil Nadu assembly, the DMK has 89 MLAs. With its allies Congress (8) and the Muslim League (1), the DMK has 98 MLAs with it. The AIADMK, post-merger, has 134 MLAs, but 19 of them have gone over to V K Sasikala’s newphew TTV Dhinakaran’s camp.
The death of Jayalalithaa in December 2016 and the unannounced retirement of her arch-rival, the 93-year-old DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi, have left a vacuum in the state’s politics and the leadership of its Dravidian politics.
The DMK is now led by Karunanidhi’s son and the leader of the opposition in the assembly, M K Stalin.
The ruling AIADMK, meanwhile, has been hurtling from one turbulent episode to another. Immediately after Jayalalithaa’s death, O. Panneerselvam took over as chief minister. Two months later, however, in February, the party elected Jayalalithaa’s close aide of 30 years V K Sasikala as its legislature party leader. Panneerselvam promptly resigned as chief minister but changed his mind two days later, saying he had been forced to resign by Sasikala and her family.
It was then that a political drama started unfolding. As Sasikala made frantic efforts to get Tamil Nadu’s ‘part-time’ Governor Vidyasagar Rao’s consent to be sworn in as chief minister, the latter arrived in the state only four days later, and then, too, stalled her swearing-in. A week later, the Supreme Court convicted Sasikala in a disproportionate assets case and she was arrested.
But before she was taken to jail in Bengaluru, Sasikala ensured that her supporter Edappadi Palaniswami was sworn in as chief minister and her nephew TTV Dinakaran installed as the party’s deputy general secretary. Two days later, Palaniswami passed the floor test when 122 AIADMK legislators supported him while Paneerselvam and his 10 legislators abstained.
The political drama then took a curious turn, as Palaniswami’s boat was constantly and vigorously rocked by a distant hand. The Tamil Nadu chief secretary’s house and office at the state secretariat were raided by Income Tax; minister Vijayabhaskar’s house, too, was raided and I-T officials said they had found documents to prove that Rs 89 crore had been distributed to voters in the R K Nagar assembly constituency, which was to have a by-poll due to Jayalalithaa’s death. The Election Commission stepped in to cancel the by-poll.
Softened up, the Palaniswami group finally merged with the OPS faction last week, with Panneerselvam becoming deputy CM. Sasikala and Dhinakaran are likely to be removed from the party at its next general council meeting.
DMK’s Miscalculation
It is in this scenario that the DMK finds itself unable to make political capital out of the turbulence in the AIADMK. DMK insiders say the main reason for their failure is the party’s miscalculation in the immediate aftermath of Jayalalithaa’s death that the AIADMK would automatically split into two or three factions and the government would fall. The DMK did not have to do anything, its leadership believed.
Except, they did not reckon that the BJP leadership, especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, would personally ensure that the AIADMK would survive, stay united and continue to run the government. The party has four more years in power.
“We made a mistake. Now, what’s happening is that the BJP is ruling the state, the AIADMK is just the mask. When PM Modi meets Panneerselvam four times in a week, you can imagine the level of interest of the BJP in AIADMK’s survival,” a senior DMK leader said on condition of anonymity.
Fighting the post-Jayalalithaa AIADMK by itself would probably not have been daunting for the Stalin-led DMK. But “fighting the BJP while it’s wearing the AIADMK mask won’t be easy,” the leader said.
The DMK is handicapped by the absence of Karunanidhi from active politics. Political observers say had he been active, he would have toppled the AIADMK government soon after Jayalalithaa’s death, especially if he had seen the BJP swooping in on the state.
Under Stalin, the party has been much less effective. To be sure, while the party faced humiliating defeats under his leadership in the 2011 assembly elections and the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, Stalin staged an impressive comeback in the 2016 elections when the party increased its tally from 24 seats in 2011 to 89. Yet, unlike Karunanidhi, Stalin is not an inclusive leader and therefore could not gather his troops against a troubled AIADMK effectively.
Both Karunanidhi and his arch-rival Jayalalitha could rise above caste politics and built broad social coalitions that served as their vote banks. Stalin has only now realised this and is beginning to make amends, party seniors say.
But the DMK is likely to face new headwinds. For one, there is the impending judgement in the 2G scam case sometime in the next few months. If the judgement goes against the accused, including Karunanidhi’s daughter Kanimozhi and former telecom minister A. Raja, then the DMK will find itself saddled with the “corrupt” tag.
The DMK is the only party in the country to have been part of three ideologically opposed ruling coalitions at the Centre between 1996 and 2013 – the Third Front government led by H D Deve Gowda and I K Gujral; the A B Vajpayee-led NDA government between 1998 and 2003; and, finally, the Congress-led UPA from 2004 to 2013. In this period, it ruled Tamil Nadu for 10 years – 1996 to 2001 and 2006 to 2011. These feats were possible because of the wily Karunanidhi’s political acumen and dexterity.
What’s in store for the DMK as Tamil Nadu politics enters a very different phase, with neither Jayalalithaa nor Karunanidhi on the political scene and with a hegemonic BJP at the peak of its prowess, is a question to which no one has the answer currently.
(The writer is a senior journalist and political commentator in Chennai)