AIADMK's inner power play: Why Palaniswami won't take back rebels OPS, Dhinakaran

A day after his late evening meeting with Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi, AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami clarified that he did not talk about taking back rebel leaders O. Panneerselvam and T.T.V. Dhinakaran into the party ahead of the 2026 Assembly elections.

Speaking to a section of the media at his hometown Salem, Palaniswami said that he travelled in the official government cars from the Tamil Nadu house in Delhi to meet the Vice President C.P. Radhakrishnan and then the Home Minister, along with other senior leaders. Palaniswami met Shah at  the latter’s residence in Delhi along with his party senior leaders - S.P. Velumani, C.Ve. Shanmugam, K.P. Munusamy, Dindigul N. Srinivasan, Inbadurai, and others. The official meeting went on for 15 minutes with the Home Minister, wherein Palaniswami and his colleagues demanded that the central government rename the Madurai airport in the name of Muthuramalinga Thevar, one of the icons celebrated by the Thevar community in South Tamil Nadu.

While the senior leaders left the meeting place, Palaniswami, along with a popular businessman from West Tamil Nadu who acted as the translator, spent 20 minutes with Shah. The meeting, according to highly placed sources, was to find a solution to the long-time inner bickering within the AIADMK and the NDA - how to manage the old rivals of Palaniswami and retain the new allies of the NDA, including OPS and T.T.V. Dhinakaran’s Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK)

While the BJP did not press for a unified AIADMK, as demanded by AIADMK rebels like Sengottaiyan or OPS, or V.K. Sasikala, party insiders say that Shah insisted on retaining Dhinakaran’s AMMK and OPS in the NDA. Apparently, the NDA in Tamil Nadu, which secured 18 percent votes with Annamalai at the helm, had withered after the AIADMK rejoined the alliance.

OPS had quit the alliance, and Dhinakaran said he would announce his decision in December. And the PMK, one of the major alliance partners of the NDA in 2024, is also split after a father-son dispute. In 2021, the AIADMK-BJP alliance lost 23 seats in the south because Dhinakaran’s AMMK ate into the AIADMK vote bank. Dhinakran scored 10.57 lakh votes in the 2021 elections, spoiling AIADMK’s victory in the south. Though AMMK’s vote share reduced from 21 lakh in 2019 to 10 lakhs in 2021, his performance in Theni in the 2024 elections added strength to the NDA.

Sources say that the closed-door meeting with Amit Shah, Palaniswami was so stubborn that he would not take back the rebels into the party.

‘Rebels could be threats’

Palaniswami believes that all of them - be it Sasikala or OPS or Dhinakaran or Sengottaiyan - could challenge his authority at any point in time, particularly after the 2026 elections. If the party loses the next elections, there could be a coup to replace Palaniswami, and taking the rebels back offer the cadres options. In fact, Palaniswami, in his earlier days as a party office bearer, had worked as a subordinate to each of them - Sengottiayan, OPS, Dhinakaran, or Sasikala. Incidentally, he was chosen by Sasikala in 2016 as the chief minister-elect at the Koovathur resort. In 2017, he campaigned for T.T.V. Dhinakaran in the countermanded R.K. Nagar by-election. And when OPS was the Chief Minister, when Jayalalithaa had to step down, Palaniswami worked in his cabinet as a minister. Hailing from the Kongu region or West Tamil Nadu, he grew in the shadow of Sengottaiyan in the party during his early political career.

Though Palaniswami had managed to put himself at the top as the party leader, most of the district  secretaries look at him as a party colleague and not as the general secretary. He derives much strength from the fact that there are no alternates to him in the party. “Taking back rebels like OPS or Sasikala or Dhinakaran will offer alternatives to move him out of the leadership position. Most of the seniors do not relish his style of politics,” says a former minister on condition of anonymity.