Testing time for Kazhagams

The passing away of DMK chief Muthuvel Karunanidhi some 20 months after the death of AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa has verily created a political vacuum in Tamil Nadu that would be hard to fill. It is a challenge that neither the state nor national parties can shy away from given the enormous political, economic, cultural and strategic importance of a state with 39 Lok Sabha seats.

The Kazhagams, DMK and AIADMK, nurtured by Karunanidhi, MGR and Jayalalithaa and their many offshoots – such as MDMK, DMDK, AMMK and Amma DMK – would now find themselves ranged against the BJP of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Congress led by Rahul Gandhi.

The vacuum in Tamil Nadu is a fearsome opportunity for Modi’s BJP. Fearsome because the BJP has to grasp the nettle for joining battle against the Kazhagams and the entrenched 50-year-old Dravida political culture that is the very anti-thesis of all that Hindutva stands for. Yet it is an opportunity for breaking through and gaining a toehold in southern India which the BJP cannot let go after its bid to capture power in Karnataka was scuttled. As Prime Minister, Modi commands respect and enjoys pockets of support in Tamil Nadu. That may not translate into votes for the BJP to stamp out the Dravida culture so deeply embedded in the Tamil psyche. Yet this is a battle that Modi and his party chief Amit Shah cannot afford to lose.

The Congress is not any better placed than the BJP. It was sent packing from Tamil Nadu in 1967. Since then, all its attempts at a come-back in alliance with one or the other Kazhagam have been thwarted. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, when it won by riding piggy-back on the DMK and the AIADMK, it was considered a “boneless wonder” as it had no head, root or branch to show for the seats it won in the state in assembly and Lok Sabha elections. Being a familiar loser in recent elections is, perhaps, the Congress party’s only advantage over the BJP in Tamil Nadu. Besides, in the four years since the BJP formed the government at the Centre, the Congress has not scored any gains in Tamil Nadu. For all its legacy in the state, in today’s situation Rahul Gandhi would be an electoral newcomer.

Ever since the DMK first swept to power 51 years ago, when a student leader of the anti-Hindi agitation defeated Congress leader K Kamaraj, Tamil Nadu has been under the sway of the DMK and the AIADMK led by first MGR and later Jayalalithaa. National parties like the Congress and BJP have managed to remain electorally relevant by clinging to the coat-tails of the Kazhagams. These past five decades have seen the rise and fall of other Tamil parties – such as the MDMK of Vaiko, the DMDK of actor Vijayakanth, the short-lived Tamil Maanila Congress of which P Chidambaram was a founder-leader, the PMK of Dr Ramdoss, the Dalit party VCK of Thol Thirumavalavan , Amma DMK of Iniyan Sampath and the Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) of T T V Dhinakaran – besides a variety of splinter groups and one-man parties which are not worth mentioning.

The confusion created by these parties is worse confounded by the re-emergence of superstar Rajinikanth and arrival of Tamil actor Kamal Haasan on the state’s political scene. Haasan is an unknown factor and an untested force. 

Rajinikanth, who batted for the DMK-TMC alliance in the 1996 General Election, flopped miserably in 2004 when he took the plunge again for the Vajpayee-led NDA. The BJP not only lost the election, but was wiped out in Tamil Nadu. It held the unpopularity of its ally, the AIADMK, responsible for its defeat while the latter attributed its rout to its alliance with the BJP.

The post-Jayalalithaa AIADMK, including the part of it in government, is in a shambles. Besides the factions led by Chief Minister Edappadi K Palanisami (EPS) and deputy chief minister O Panneerselvam (OPS) that have joined hands, there is the ousted AIADMK deputy general secretary T T V Dhinakaran, who now heads the AMMK. Dhinakaran has proved to be more than a match for the AIADMK propped up by the BJP and the Centre. In fact, the ruling AIADMK is yet to establish its majority on the assembly floor. Dhinakaran commands a flock of at least 18 MLAs, without whose support in any floor test, the EPS-OPS regimet is bound to collapse.

Dhinakaran’s victory, as an ‘independent’ in the December 2017 assembly by-election from R K Nagar, when he won against the onslaught of force and resources of the Centre, the state and all the other parties showed that there could be unforeseen upsets within Dravida politics which render the BJP and Congress party irrelevant.

Six weeks before that poll, Modi had met Karunanidhi. The meeting was seen as the BJP’s recognition of the fact that having the AIADMK of EPS-OPS as its proxy would be of little use at election time when the DMK is the state’s leading party. Thus, the BJP’s options were to either strike a deal with the DMK or “engineer” a situation to its advantage within the DMK. Having failed to achieve the former, the BJP may now begin working on each member of the DMK’s first family. Such a game-plan may severely test the leadership skills of Karunanidhi’s son and anointed successor M K Stalin.

However, as much as Stalin, Modi and Rahul would also be on trial. In this fraught scenario, there would be two wars waged at the same time: a fratricidal conflict amongst Dravida parties and a bigger battle by them against the national parties to safeguard Dravida territory. Tamil Nadu is in for interesting times.

The author is Consulting Editor-Opinion Page, DNA