From opposing dynastic politics to anointing his own son: Life comes full circle for MDMK leader Vaiko

Chennai: The year was 1993. Fiery Vaiko led a rebellion against the powerful M Karunanidhi, opposing the rising stature of his younger son M K Stalin in the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).

The expulsion of Vaiko, then a Rajya Sabha MP, plunged the Dravidian party into a crisis, much bigger than the split engineered by the legendary M G Ramachandran in 1972 before he launched the AIADMK.

Vaiko, through his speeches, projected him as the ’poster boy’ of anti-dynastic politics in Tamil Nadu, though he swung like a pendulum between the DMK, his parent party, and AIADMK by courting them during elections.

Thirty years after the great rebellion, Vaiko’s political journey has come full circle – he has now named his son, Durai Vaiko, a political novice who was thrust into the post of headquarters secretary in 2021, from Tiruchirapalli. He is being fielded from the lone seat his struggling party secured in the DMK-led Secular Progressive Alliance (SPA).

Durai Vaiyapuri, as he was known as before his sudden entry into politics, is a 52-year-old businessman, who will now test his electoral fortunes from Tiruchirapalli, a seat that the MDMK last won in 2004 in an alliance with the DMK.

The man who once derided dynastic politics has sadly brought his reluctant son to steer the sinking ship of MDMK. Vaiko is no exception as it has become a fashion for politicians to get Lok Sabha seats for their children even as they rule the roost in the state’s political arena. Even AIADMK, which denounces dynastic politics, is no exception to this trend.

“Vaiko has travelled a full circle of his consciousness. He has come back to accepting what he opposed for decades together. He has succumbed to the dynamics of entrenched politics. I believe he could have stayed as an unique personality in politics, but the circumstances and time didn’t allow him,” Prof Ramu Manivannan, who taught history at the University of Madras, told DH.

“Vaiko hasn’t found an answer to the very cause he fought for. He has come back to the same place that he resisted in his life,” he added.

And Vaiko can only blame himself for the situation he and his party find themselves in Tamil Nadu -- the MDMK lost its sheen within two years of its launch in 1994 and drew a blank in the first elections the party faced in 1996. From 1998, the MDMK has faced elections only in an alliance with one of the Dravidian majors, in 2014, Vaiko joined the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) but quit within a year.

Following the failure of his experiments – MDMK had a short courtship with Left parties, prominent Dalit outfit VCK and late Vijayakanth’s DMDK – Vaiko finally ended up where he began his career, DMK, and endorsed Stalin for Chief Ministership. For this, Vaiko got a 'return gift' from Stalin with much love – a Rajya Sabha seat in 2019.

Known for his fiery speech and love for Tamil literature, Vaiko drew the attention of the ruling dispensations through his speeches in the Upper House and became a sensation among DMK cadres which irked Karunanidhi who was grooming Stalin to be his political heir.

And the rest is history. If his son wins the Lok Sabha seat, the father will continue to represent the MDMK in the House of Elders, and the son in the Lower House. As they say, it is all in the family.