It will be no surprise if Tamil Nadu’s Deputy Chief Minister and the ruling AIADMK coordinator O. Panneerselvam launches yet another Dharma Yudham to save his party. The EPS-OPS honeymoon seems to be wading away and the power struggle in the ruling camp became apparent when the latter admitted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi negotiated him to merge with Chief Minister Edappady Palaniswamy's camp.
Off late, Panneerselvam, who seems to be the most disturbed lot in the pack of ministers in the EPS cabinet, has been dropping hints on the discomfort and the differences within the ruling AIADMK camp. Speaking at a party office-bearers meeting at Theni on February 16, he said that it was on the behest of the prime minister that he merged his faction with that of Palaniswamy. “He (Modi) said that you could join to save the party,” the deputy chief minister said, without specifying exactly when the conversation took place.
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Sources close to Panneerselvam say that the statement was an outcome of the ongoing tussle among the senior ministers hitting a feverish pitch. The sources were more specific when they said OPS was “finding it hard to get his lucrative positions for his supporters. It is an outcome of the differences in appointing members of the steering committee which was announced on the day of merger.” They also confirm that the expulsions and re-organisation of the party is the bottom of these differences.
Sources also claim that the Theni remarks by OPS was to send out strong signals to the EPS camp of his discomfort at being in the ruling party and bring pressure on the chief minister and the two ministers close to him to accommodate his supporters during the restructuring of the party. He said: “PM asked me to merge.” But stronger than this was the next statement where he said the cabinet berth was forced on him.
“I said I don’t want to be part of the government as a minister. I wanted to take care of the party. But PM insisted that I be part of the cabinet. And our local administration minister S.P. Velumani, too, insisted that I be part of the cabinet,” he said. In fact, this was to earn the sympathy of a portion of the AIADMK supporters who are unhappy with EPS. “If anyone else had been in my position and faced such crisis, he would have committed suicide,” he said at the same meeting. This, in fact, was aimed at the partymen who have expressed angst for not being accommodated in senior positions in the newly merged AIADMK.
A businessman politician in his camp made it clear that the discomfort and displeasure within the EPS-OPS camps were over the appointment of office bearers to the party which has not happened for the past six months. “He told us a week before that the steering committee will be constituted and a new office bearer list will be out in a day or two. But that has not happened and he doesn’t foresee it anymore. This statement is the fall out of the discomfort,” he says.
An astute politician who is known to play his cards close to his heart and much safe every time, OPS’s statement is also being looked at the backdrop of the 18 MLAs disqualification case pending in the Madras HC, in which the verdict is likely to be out anytime soon. It may be recalled that OPS’s famous meditation at the beachside grave happened just a week before the crucial Supreme Court verdict that convicted V.K. Sasikala in a DA case. Sources close to him read this statement, too, in the backdrop of the pending case in the Madras HC. Party insiders are of the opinion that the EPS camp had been negotiating with the Sasikala camp to save the government if anything adverse happens in the MLAs disqualification case.
Known to be a politician who never makes any statement without any plan, OPS’s revelation in Theni makes it obvious that EPS has gone back in his promises and that BJP was behind the merge. However the visit of Prime Minister Modi on February 24, Jayalalitha’s 70th birthday, for distributing free scooters to women, an election promise given by Jayalalitha, has thrown open the jukebox. Free scooters to women was a welfare scheme and one of the pet schemes announced by Jayalalithaa in AIADMK’s 2016 manifesto and a prime minister need not come down to launch a state government’s welfare scheme. Sources say that in the garb of launching the welfare scheme, the PM is likely to make the last ditch attempt to keep the two together.