Sibling rivalry in the DMK opens up the political space in Tamil Nadu

M Karunanidhi (left) with MK Stalin

DMK leader M Karunanidhi is a troubled man these days. His party is not in power in the state and nor is it in alliance with the UPA government at the Centre — but that is the least of his concerns now. On Friday, one of the DMK leader’s sons, MK Alagiri, was suspended from the party for anti-party activities. That this came after Alagiri’s younger brother, MK Stalin, was appointed to lead the party was not lost to anyone who knew about the bitter sibling rivalry.
All this has been accompanied by the sound-and-light show that Indian politics promises the people — Karunanidhi accused Alagiri of saying that Stalin will die in three or four months; Alagiri denied it; Stalin took it in stride; Stalin supporters burnt Alagiri in effigy and a section of the party nominated Stalin’s name for the Madurai Lok Sabha seat (at present Alagiri is the MP from Madurai). It is surprising that for all his political sagacity, Karunanidhi, at the autumn of his political career, could not see this coming and planned a better transition of power.

MK Alagiri

The crisis of this sort is detrimental to any political organisation and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for the DMK. The party was just about recovering from the electoral drubbing it got at the 2011 assembly elections — of the 234 seats in the state assembly the DMK managed a paltry 23 — and it was cobbling together an alliance for the general elections.
The DMK is no stranger to dissent. In 1972, MG Ramachandran broke away from the party to from the AIADMK. In 1994, Karunanidhi’s then trusted lieutenant Vai Gopalswamy (Vaiko) was expelled from the party. The relationship between the two soured when Stalin and Alagiri were given preference over Vaiko.
For more than four decades Tamil Nadu has had either a DMK or an AIADMK government. This two-party dominance has given little room for other parties to grow and the many that have sprouted out during this time have remained on the fringes or faded out. However, if the Alagiri-Stalin tiff were to hamper or even split the DMK, it could lead to a vacuum in the political space, altering the present balance. If such a scenario arises, the biggest gainer, for the moment, is actor-politician Vijayakanth’s DMDK which got 7.9% of the votes in the 2011 assembly polls. The Congress, Left parties and the PMK are other probable gainers.
Though Karunanidhi, last December, declared that the DMK would not ally with the Congress in the coming elections, the possibility of a post-poll alliance with either the Congress or even the BJP cannot be ruled out. However, the present crisis will hamper the chances of the Dravidian party to net a sizable number of seats to be wooed by either of the national parties or even for a third front. This uncertainty makes politics interesting in the state.
(This appeared in the Hindustan Times on January 30)