After the DMK's humiliating loss in the RK Nagar Assembly seat bypoll, party chief M Karunanidhi's elder son and former union minister MK Alagir blamed his younger sibling MK Stalin's for the loss saying that he did not do enough field work.
Alagiri who was expelled from the party in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls in 2014 for anti-party activities said leave alone the RK Nagar bypoll, the party would not win any election as long as Stalin leads the party. His comments have come ahead of the party's high-level executive committee meeting to be held here on Friday.
Rejecting the Stalin's statement blaming money power for the election defeat, Alagiri, in an interview to a Tamil magazine, said, "There is a strong resentment against both the ruling party and the main opposition party in RK Nagar. Otherwise, how come an independent candidate Dhinakaran, placed 33rd on the ballot box list, got a resounding victory?"
"See, you should get down to the ground and do fieldwork. Merely going around in a jeep cannot fetch you votes," Alagiri said, recalling how his dad Karunanidhi used to call him several times in a day to keep a tab of bypoll campaigning works when he used to oversee such elections.
Alagiri, the Madurai-based strongman, had helped the DMK win successive by-elections in 2006-11 when his party was in power in the state. He was then accused by opposition parties of masterminding money distribution to voters in the Thirumangalam Assembly bypoll which was infamously called as "Thirumangalam formula".
The ruling AIADMK latched onto Alagiri's comments to take potshots at Stalin. "Alagiri has said DMK cannot win (under Stalin's leadership)… His (Stalin's) own brother has said so," senior AIADMK leader and Fisheries Minister D Jayakumar said, without elaborating.
After the Alagiri's expulsion in 2014, Stalin was appointed as party's working president in January this year.
POWER PLAY
- Alagiri and Stalin had been involved in a long-running feud in the DMK’s first family with both contending to be their father’s political heir.
- A former Union minister, Alagiri had once famously asked if the DMK was a ‘mutt’ where a senior pontiff could appoint his successor, indicating that he was always in the reckoning.
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