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The Tamil Maanila Congress has formally sacked P Chidambaram and his two legislator-aides from the party. The delayed decision followed the former Union finance minister, under suspension for floating the TMC Democratic Forum, appearing alongside the ruling DMK leadership, when the latter announced candidates for the assembly elections in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry on Saturday evening.
TMC disciplinary action committee convenor A R Marimuthu announced the decision on Sunday afternoon, after party founder G K Moopanar announced his inaccessibility to the media and friends for a week, citing health reasons.
The message was clear: Moopanar would not like to take the decision, but Chidambaram had left him with no option after appearing on the DMK dais, criticising the official party line.
Chidambaram had set the tone at the DMK rally. He had only one request to the DMK leadership: "You can criticise the TMC decision on aligning with the AIADMK, but not my leader Moopanar."
It sounded as much a threat as a request, and the idea obviously was for the DMK leadership to send out the message down the line to the party's third and fourth-line platform speakers.
What also did not go unnoticed at the DMK rally was the pride of place that Chidambaram occupied on the DMK dais; he sat to the right of DMK president and state Chief Minister M Karunanidhi, a place that used to be occupied by estranged Union Industry and Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran.
Coming as it did hours after Maran had announced his decision to stay away from active politics and his camp's resentment over Chidambaram sharing the same rung in the DMK publicity material for the rally, it seems to have said a lot more.
The DMK leadership may be looking at the future, and it seems to have vague plans for non-party leaders like Chidambaram in its scheme of things. The party is stung by the advancing age of its top leadership and the health condition of its second-generation, including Maran, and those like state ministers Ko Si Mani and Veerapandi Arumugam.
Not wanting to be blamed by history as heralding a setting sun in Dravidian Tamil Nadu, the Karunanidhi leadership would rather have the baton passed on to the third generation.
Thus, the increasing role played by Karunanidhi's mayoral son M K Stalin has become more relevant. Starting with the forced exit of the late M G Ramacahandran from the party, Stalin has been taking an increasingly active role; unlike most politician-sons known to the rest of India, his role limited only to areas that were being handled by cousin Maran.
As the faceless face of the DMK in Delhi, Maran worked out party strategy and understood the winds of national change better, be it on the political plane or economic and industrial climes.
It is this gap that the DMK may now find difficult to fill, particularly in the changing circumstances, where Stalin seems to understand and appreciate difficulties posed by the fast-changing political perception and economic compulsions of the common man.
Like other Dravidian leaders, be it Karunanidhi, MGR or Jayalalitha, he would not like a home-grown DMK leader to become a parallel power centre in the party, that too with blessings from the political Delhi of the times.
It was this well-founded apprehension of Karunanidhi that caused him to draft nephew Maran, when the likes of K Rajaram and the late Nanjil K Manoharan were running the less complex affairs of the DMK in the Delhi of the sixties and seventies.
Stalin, thanks to the 'Maran-isation' of DMK affairs in Delhi, feels the absence of future talent, which only an outsider like Chidambaram has.
The induction of Chidambaram as the future voice of Tamil Nadu in Delhi will be beneficial to the DMK and the state, DMK strategists feel. In his decade-long ministerial span in Delhi, Chidambaram has built up a reputation and enough business contacts, the world over, which could be tapped to industrialise the state, which alone will appeal to new generation voters in Tamil Nadu, they say.
Simultaneously, it will help remove from the active scene a possible challenger to the Stalin throne, if the DMK succeeded in vanquishing the AIADMK rival for a second time in the elections. Such a course would also ensure that Chidambaram would not drift towards the Bharatiya Janata Party ally of the DMK, which could be a future threat to the party, if and when the AIADMK is sidelined.
For all the hype and controversy attending on his emerging leadership of the DMK, Stalin seems to recognise the limitations. For one, the mood and methods of the new generation voters are not like those in the past, who had readily adopted 'ism's of the DMK and AIADMK kind. With all existing political parties in the state having lost ideological relevance and having outlived their utility, they now have relevance only as another political brand, whose name, if not image, is better known than that of the other, mainly because of long association.
Thus, Stalin seemed to have readily agreed to the concept of caste parties like the Vanniar-strong PMK first, and its Dalit rivals later, when the DMK and the AIADMK were seen as having lost out the race over time.
Stalin would have preferred the political TMC to fit the bill, but the latter would not yield; he will now have to settle for the best that the TMC has to offer.
Stalin also seems to have realised his limitations, like his father, who had learnt lessons from Congress rival, the late K Kamaraj.
Kamaraj becoming All-India Congress Committee president in the mid-sixties compromised everything that the Congress of his days stood for in state politics, with the result, the DMK could capitalise on the anti-incumbency wave of the 1967 elections.
The failed NTR experiment in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh two decades later only reinforced his apprehensions. With the result, Karunanidhi would not accept the late Biju Patnaik's offer to make him prime minister after the 1996 elections, in return for conceding then chief minister Jayalalitha, the hierarchy of a unified Dravidian outfit.
Stalin seems to have learnt the lessons that Maran had to offer him on the politico-electoral needs, only that he is going ahead without his much-older cousin, for reasons of health and hierarchy -- the health of the former, and the hierarchy of his own dispensation. Chidambaram will fit the bill, and he may also be made a Rajya Sabha member and a Union minister, especially if the DMK won the assembly polls. By that time, Chidambaram too would have become more acceptable to the DMK cadres than during the formative days of the anti-Jaya TMC, thanks to the gruelling campaign tour he is planning for the polls.
Chidambaram seems to have made a beginning with his speech at the DMK rally, coming to be appreciated by the common man and party cadres. At the venue, incidentally, Chidambaram was pitted against, so to say, against the better-known oratorial skills of Karunanidhi, and the ideological outbursts of party general secretary K Anbazhagan, whose diction and ideology had made the DMK what it is today, but are now seen as being embedded in the past.
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