If there was someone hoping and praying for a severe drubbing for the opposition DMK in the recently-concluded R.K. Nagar Assembly byelection in Tamil Nadu, other than political adversaries and ideological critics of varying genre, it was M.K. Alagiri, the disgruntled and ‘discredited’ son of ailing party supremo, M. Karunanidhi.
Alagiri who was union minister for chemicals under the Manmohan Singh-led UPA-2 regime for a time, is openly celebrating DMK nominee Marudhu Ganesh losing his security deposit in R.K. Nagar and is out blaming younger sibling and party working president, M.K. Stalin.
“The DMK lost not because of money, but because of Stalin,” Alagiri said as he was waiting for someone to ask him about the party’s dismal showing in the bypoll, only a year-and-half after a relatively creditable and credible performance in the Assembly polls of May 2016 under the very same man, even though rival AIADMK’s Chief Minister Jayalalithaa romped home, still. “The DMK has not won any election under Stalin, and cannot win as long as he is heading the party,” Alagiri told a Tamil magazine after the R.K. Nagar byelection.
The message was clear: “Recall me, and I will ensure DMK’s victory.”
Alagiri, as may be recalled, had led the ‘southern resurgence’ of the party, especially in the 2009 parliamentary polls, when the DMK-led combine took 10 out of 11 Lok Sabha seats from the region, put under his care by Karunanidhi, who is now bedridden with memory loss and other health issues afflicting most people in their nineties.
Therein lies the hitch. When active and kicking, Karunanidhi also sacked Alagiri from the primary membership of the DMK, for ‘anti-party activities’.
His membership restoration now depends on Stalin, and not anyone else. True, after R.K. Nagar, murmurings of discomfort can be heard from within the DMK ranks, but not necessarily against Stalin’s leadership, but against his principled stand against bribing voters in any big way, other than through promises of government policies and programmes.
A byelection is not a possible venue, and the opposition status for the party is not an opportunity.
Existential threats
As TV talk-show pundits said through the bypoll campaign and even afterwards, the DMK stood out as much for not being accused of bribing the voters in R.K. Nagar as for the massive defeat that it suffered. The question within is if they should continue on the same course or think and act as differently as the rest in the pool, when it came to the Lok Sabha polls of 2019, and the State Assembly elections, due in 2021 but that could happen any time soon, giving the post-R.K. Nagar existential threats of a different kind facing the ruling AIADMK, with respect to the victorious Independent and ‘rebel’ T.T.V. Dhinakaran.
Such existential threats have always come in the DMK’s way, at every turn, almost since Karunanidhi’s first two terms in office, when the late actor-politician M.G. Ramachandran, MGR, broke away to form the rival ADMK. The ‘stability threat’ that MGR’s greater popularity threw up against Karunanidhi’s still-young regime and leadership meant that he began going easy on corruption issues, which soon began clouding the public vision on the ‘social achievements’ of the first ‘Dravidian rule’, post-Independence.
If this led to MGR and the rechristened AIADMK coming to power post-Emergency, recharged the Indira Gandhi Government’s unjustified dismissal of the state Government after the failure of the short-lived’ Janata Party experiment’ meant that the AIADMK too could not hope to achieve political stability and electoral continuity/victory just by being honest and principled.
Ditto, it was with the return of Karunanidhi and the DMK to power in the state, post-MGR, in 1989, followed by a dismissal, and their return again in the 1996 general elections. It was known to those that were following Tamil Nadu politics that if the DMK lost the 2001 polls, it owed the defeat to the impossibility of individual candidates and also the unwillingness of the leadership to ‘buy up voters’ and pay up cadres, as to the ‘victory combine’ that Jaya mustered.
‘Jaya model’, not ‘Thirumangalam model’
Years later, the nation would come to dub the high-ended, high-handed bribing of voters as the Alagiri-centric ‘Thirumangalam model’. Truth be acknowledged even at this late hour, it was the ‘Jaya model’, effectively introduced between 2001, in Assembly byelections in Kancheepuram, Gummidipoondi, Saidapet and Andipatti, where Jaya herself contested after the Supreme Court had cleared her of all sins in the infamous ‘TANSI land-deal case’.
In between, even when the DMK was in power (1996-2001), the AIADMK, still in the opposition, sought to endear disenchanted DMK cadres at the grassroots level, ahead of the 1998 Lok Sabha polls, by identifying and ‘bribing’ them long before campaign began, just for them to sit at home and mislead their own leadership at different levels.
The DMK, now in the opposition, in the 2004 general elections did it to the ruling AIADMK, when in the polling booth where Chief Minister Jayalalithaa cast her vote, party agents were known to have walked out post-lunch.
Did a ‘honest’ loss in the 2001 polls trigger rethinking for the party to promote boisterous leaders like Alagiri (suspended from the party, for a time) and not discourage the ‘Thirumangalam formula’?
The question is now back in the cadres' mind after R.K. Nagar, and the Stalin leadership has purchased time till year-end by appointing a committee to find out, what could justify, if at all, such a severe drubbing (even though the party had not won the seat for years now).
Indications are that as in the late Nineties, the DMK cadres possibly not only did not vote for the party and work for the candidate’s victory (no signs whatsoever of faction feuds of any kind), but also have seemingly voted for either the victorious Dhinakaran or the runner-up, E. Madhusudhanan, the septuagenarian AIADMK leader, who definitely was better known to the locals as a long-term cadre and one-time minister under Jayalalithaa than Ganesh.
Namakku Naamaye
The larger issue from R.K. Nagar, as like Thirumangalam, relates to the increasing rich-poor divide in the society, which has ‘compelled’ electoral candidates desirous of a victory to keep spending more than even the most corrupt of them could hope to recoup after victory—which was/is still doubtful when spending.
This will also be the question that Stalin’s strategists would be studying closely, as the leader cannot put it off any time soon, not put it off for too long, as the 2019 parliamentary polls are already upon a party that has now to start almost from scratch.
For the DMK just now, Alagiri has fired the salvo which none else could do, also because Stalin’s ‘new approach’ to politics and elections through his Namakku Naamaye (we-for-ourselves) campaign caught the imagination of youthful voters, who had helped the DMK combine set a record of sorts.
At the bottom of the heap is the searching question if such a ‘principled approach’, with which old-time critics of the DMK and Karunanidhi still refuse to associate the party with, can bring in more of ‘non-committed voters’ as it had done whenever Jayalalithaa was in power, peaking in 2016.
In the Assembly polls at the time, for a ‘losing’ party/combine in the State, the DMK-led alliance, with the Congress as a partner, bagged a total of 98 seats in 234, as against the conventional belief in ‘winner-takes-all-in-TN’. Better still as far as records go, in overall vote percentage, the difference was a low 1.5 per cent or even less, with some losing candidates from the combine challenging the results in the Madras High Court, for the narrow margins recorded.
Taking back Alagiri into the party and sharing power with him is only one problem facing Stalin and the DMK. The larger question is if even with Alagiri, could the party recapture the 2016 voter imagination and build on it ahead of upcoming elections, and at the same time regain the cadres' morale?
But despite media hype to the contrary for long in between, the party general council and other decision-making fora have been in Stalin’s control, in a way even when Karunanidhi was around and relatively active. The reason was/is not far to seek.
If some in the party now think Alagiri is the kind of man that the cadre identify with during difficult times, when the party faced difficulties after losing the 2011 elections because of the 2G scam, and Jayalalithaa came back victorious, he was not to be seen anywhere other than in airport lounges and his parents’ Gopalapuram residence in Chennai.
In contrast, through thick and thin, Stalin has stood in the frontline, shouldering and sharing the legal, political and propaganda onslaughts of rival party governments in the state and at the Centre, since entering politics at a young age in the early Seventies.
It is here that the cadre’s soul-searching would begin, and which is where the Stalin camp is also likely to direct the post-R.K. Nagar processes within the party.
In doing so, Stalin himself might be doing some soul-searching on how to reorganise the party at all levels beyond what he did post the 2011 debacle. If he found a useful and contained role for Alagiri, then and then alone would he be able to convince himself to have the ‘dismissed’ member back in the party and somewhere close to the helm.
For now, Stalin may not yield to the pressure from family and others of the kind that had influenced Karunanidhi at times, including those seeking to bring back Alagiri, or grant greater accommodation for half-sister and Rajya Sabha member, Kanimozhi, after a Delhi CBI court acquitted her in the 2G scam case.
If nothing else, even party second liners and cadres would not want any promised appeals in the case hampering whatever chances the DMK may have in the Lok Sabha polls in 2019, as the 2G scam had rocked the bottom of a ‘performing government’ in the 2011 elections.
(The writer is director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, the multi-disciplinary Indian public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi. email: sathiyam54@gmail.com)
