Chennai: In August 2018, grief and turmoil gripped the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) as it witnessed the hospitalisation, death and burial of its revered leader and former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, M. Karunanidhi. The party had to fight a legal battle to secure Karunanidhi his final resting place, next to DMK founder C.N. Annadurai, at Chennai’s Marina Beach.
The party’s then-working president — and Karunanidhi’s son M.K. Stalin — was understandably shattered and heartbroken, but he rose to the occasion, and his first order to party cadres was to maintain military discipline and ensure that their leader gets a dignified farewell — which he did, following the Madras High Court verdict allowing his burial at the Marina Beach spot.
The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) government in the state at the time had rejected the DMK’s request to bury Karunanidhi in the Marina Beach area, stating that it was “unable to allot space at Marina Beach owing to several pending cases in the Madras High Court and legal complications”. It had instead offered a two-acre plot near Gandhi Mandapam, a memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, where memorials of some other chief ministers are located.
The HC judgment allowing the Marina Beach burial sparked an emotional explosion at Chennai’s Rajaji Hall, where Karunanidhi’s body was kept for public homage. Stalin, who burst into tears hearing the verdict, was comforted by his son Udhayanidhi, sister M. Kanimozhi, and trusted lieutenants Durai Murugan, A. Raja, R.S. Bharathi, and other senior leaders of the party, who were also overwhelmed by the loss.
Though Stalin had been with the party since the early 1970s, he had always been in the shadows of his father. After the party patriarch’s demise, questions were raised about the DMK’s future and many had even warned that the DMK might face multiple splits, as the AIADMK has faced since its former chief J. Jayalalithaa’s demise in 2016.
But Stalin proved them wrong, emerging as an able leader, an administrator, and an influencer in national politics.
“Many had doubted if Stalin could hold the party together, but after being unanimously elected to the party president’s post in 2018, he proved himself worthy of the cadres’ support. He ensured that the party continued to remain united and steered the party to a thumping victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls,” a DMK local leader from south Chennai told ThePrint.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the DMK and its allies won 38 of 39 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu. The DMK-led alliance also won the 2021 assembly elections in the state, with Stalin going on to take oath as the Tamil Nadu chief minister.
He has forged a strong alliance with the Congress and other regional parties, and ahead of this year’s scheduled Lok Sabha elections, positioned himself as a vocal member of the INDIA bloc of parties in opposition to the BJP at the Centre, calling for “unity” among the allies earlier this week to defeat the BJP.
While Stalin is firmly in the saddle, he has a very different style of ruling the party and government than Karunanidhi. The times and circumstances in which the two leaders operate are also very different, said political analysts.
While Karunanidhi preferred to handle every function himself, Stalin is a delegator. Karunanidhi was accessible to every cadre of the party, but with Stalin, a rung of senior leaders act as a filter. And while Karunanidhi seemed like he could cruise through handling the government and the party with just as much attention to detail, Stalin is still learning the tightrope balance, according to analysts.
“The two of them are from two very different periods. Karunanidhi had to face the Emergency [of the ’70s] and the fall of his government, but Stalin now is facing a much tougher period of ideological battle with the BJP, a non-cooperative central government, a non-cooperative governor, and the constant fight with them. Stalin is facing a tougher battle than Karunanidhi,” claimed political analyst Priyan Srinivasan.
The two leaders also share similarities, according to party leaders — the foremost being that Stalin is still relying on the same group of leaders groomed and developed by Karunanidhi, whom the patriarch himself relied on heavily.
According to party leaders, one of the major reasons why Stalin has so smoothly slid into his father’s shoes as DMK chief is because he is mainly furthering the ideology and schemes of Karunanidhi instead of bringing his own line of thought into the party and shaking up the rank and file.
ThePrint looks at the differences and similarities between the two leaders and how the party functioned under each.
DMK during Karunanidhi
For fifty years, Karunanidhi, lovingly called Kalaignar (artist), had held the role of the party chief since the demise of Annadurai in 1969.
In the next five decades, he served as the chief minister of Tamil Nadu five times and a legislator for 13 times — never losing an election. A prolific writer, orator and champion of social justice and federalism, Karunanidhi left behind a rich legacy of achievements and a loyal following of millions of Tamils.
When Annadurai dissented from the Dravida Kazhagam and formed the DMK, Karunanidhi had joined the party when it had still not entered into electoral politics.
“It was only in 1957 that the DMK entered electoral politics. But even before being in electoral politics, Kalaignar had worked for social change through his writing, stage speeches, etc., and he had garnered a lot of support,” former Rajya Sabha MP T.K.S. Elangovan told ThePrint.
Though electoral politics brought in some amount of restraint to the party, Karunanidhi, Elangovan recalled, was a hands-on leader.
“Kalaignar would come every day to the party office and gave as much importance to the party as to governance. Even if he saw a small newspaper article on a local problem, he would get in touch with the concerned carder and get the issue resolved. If there were any issues or confusion over vote counting, he would volunteer to step into counting the votes,” he said.
Karunanidhi also had to face many challenges and crises during his tenure, such as the Emergency, the anti-Hindi agitation [of the ’60s] and the reservation policy. He had a fairly influential role with the central government through this tenure, political analysts told ThePrint.
“He became chief minister in 1969 and that was the year in which the Congress suffered a major split. By offering the support of his MPs to Indira Gandhi, he had the support of the Union government around that time,” A.S. Panneerselvan, political analyst and fellow at Chennai’s Roja Muthiah Research Library, told ThePrint.
He added that Karunanidhi even had a “big say” in the formation of the United Front government at the Centre between 1996 and 1998, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in 1999 and both the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments under Manmohan Singh between 2004 and 2014.
DMK under Stalin
In 1973, Stalin was elected to the DMK’s general committee and rose to limelight in 1976 when he was arrested under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) for protesting against the Emergency imposed across the country between June 1975 and March 1977.
He rose through the ranks of the party by becoming the first youth wing secretary in 1983, fighting his first unsuccessful assembly election in 1984, becoming the deputy general secretary in 2003, and the working president in 2017.
But between becoming deputy CM in 2009 and Tamil Nadu CM in 2021 was an over 10-year gap. While the announcement that Stalin would be his political heir came in October 2016, in May that year Karunanidhi had said in an interview, “Stalin can become CM only if nature does something to me.”
As a son, successor, and follower, Stalin has carried on the path shown by Karunanidhi, DMK leaders told ThePrint.
“The policies, schemes, and projects implemented by Kalaiganr and now Thalaivar (Stalin) have touched the lives of all the people living in Tamil Nadu. Kalaignar was the trend-setter and worked for inclusive growth, and upliftment of SC/STs [scheduled castes/scheduled tribes] and OBC [other backward class] with his policies. Now, a platform is being set by our present leader to continue and enhance those policies,” said DMK spokesperson A. Saravanan.
Citing an example, he said, in 1996 reservation for women in government jobs was 30 percent but that has now been raised to 40 percent. “These kinds of consistent effort and welfarism are unparalleled,” Saravanan told ThePrint.
Stalin, as a party president, was seen every day at the party headquarters — like his father — but now, with administrative pressure (as CM), his visits have reduced, senior DMK leaders pointed out.
“The financial crisis created in the state by the previous AIADMK government has put Stalin in a position where he has to spend more time in government administration. But this is just the start of his CM-ship. Soon, he will be able to strike a balance,” said Elangovan.
He added despite his absence, Stalin delegated the party work to his trusted colleagues, such as himself, the party treasurer (T.R Baalu), the organisation secretary (R.S. Bharathi), and various other office bearers and district secretaries.
“We have to oversee the party work and report to the leader directly, and he then advises on what needs to be done,” Elangovan added.
Stalin also faces a tough challenge in governance, highlighted analysts. According to Panneerselvan, since 2014, when the BJP came to power at the Centre, states have faced “extreme centralisation”.
“It manifests in the form of enacting laws, which are essentially state subjects, and you don’t even have the wherewithal to raise it in the Parliament and stop it. Because both the chairman of the Rajya Sabha, the speaker of the Lok Sabha, tend to behave like party members rather than neutral heads of these two centres of debate. At the end of the day, democracy is about discussion and dissent,” he said.
“There is no space for discussion and descent, which was prevalent during the period of Karunanidhi, but is missing now in Stalin’s period,” Panneerselvan claimed.
While Karunanidhi’s tenure in governance oscillated between a Union government where he had a say and a central government that was confrontational, Stalin came to power during the BJP’s second term “which means there is some amount of intrinsic centralisation which was already there,” according to the political analyst.
“The difficulty for Stalin is to deal with an extremely centralising Union, which is trying to restrict his elbow room by not permitting a different voice in the judiciary, restrictive governor, and all those aspects are making Stalin’s approach difficult,” Panneerselvan said.
According to Elangovan, during Karunanidhi’s time, the “BJP listened to us and accepted our suggestion. But now, the BJP is not ruling the country, it is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)”.
“The DMK has to ideologically face a lot of issues now,” he claimed.
Hindutva forces and hard bargaining
In 2002, Karunanidhi was quoted by media as saying that the term “Hindu” meant “thief”, and he later clarified that he meant the term as someone who “steals the heart”.
Again, in 2007, at the peak of the controversy over the Sethusamudram ship channel project issue, Karunanidhi had reportedly said, “Who is this Raman? (as Hindu deity Ram is referred to in Tamil). In which engineering college did he study and become a civil engineer? When did he build this so-called bridge? Is there any evidence for this?”
Later in 2008, when he was the chief minister, he, in a poem, criticised the Hindu practice of smearing ash, saffron or putting a tilak on the forehead “as regressive practices”.
The ascendance of Hindutva politics in the country has been attributed as a major difference between the times of the two leaders.
“Karunanidhi had a smooth sailing, he did not face resistance for his ideological speeches on god, superstitions and Hindus, but now DMK’s every remark is scrutinised and the BJP has been using every opportunity to attack the DMK,” said political analyst Srinivasan.
“Since PM Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, there has been an increase in the Hindutva ideology, Hindu fanaticism in the county, which has also led to more serious ideological battles,” the analyst alleged.
According to DMK spokesperson Saravanan, though Karunanidhi had seen and interacted with the stalwarts of Indian politics and even seen the Emergency, “we are now in a situation worse than the Emergency”.
“Rigorous onslaught of extreme Hindutva, which the present leader [Stalin] is successfully preventing and setting up a counter-narrative, is very admirable,” he claimed.
The concerns of the leaders and analysts were not restricted to Hindutva, but also bureaucracy. The all-India services fall under the Union government, which means at some level, there is both direct as well as indirect hold on the Indian state by the Centre, and this “steel frame” has also been throwing challenges at the DMK government in the state, they told ThePrint.
In 1947, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel referred to the civil servants as the “steel frame of India” — the backbone — which would churn out policies and programmes for the government of the day.
“Stalin’s case is of intense negotiation, I don’t think Karunanidhi was under such pressure to negotiate everything,” said political analyst Panneerselvan.
Calling it not just an issue in Tamil Nadu, Elangovan said this was an issue in most non-BJP-ruled states. “The officers are attached to the central government and they are afraid of the BJP at the Centre. Taking into account the party’s rapport with the ruling government in the state [a reference to the DMK-BJP equation] the officers don’t want to face any problem. When their attitude becomes obvious, our leader [Stalin] changes the officer’s portfolio and puts a more efficient officer on the job,” he claimed.
ThePrint reached five bureaucrats in the state for comments, but all of declined comment.
Meanwhile, speaking to ThePrint, Narayanan Thirupathy, BJP state vice-president, claimed, “Any government is run by IAS officers only, there is no doubt that IAS runs the government. They go by the books, Constitution and system. It is the corrupt politician who breaks the rules and laws. Any irregularities are not done by the officials, but aided by the politicians.”
Thirupathy added: “The argument that IAS officers are uncooperative is not true. These officials operate as per the rule of law. This argument is invalid and nonsense.”
Talking about allegations of the rise of Hindutva politics, Thirupathy claimed the DMK had always been an “anti-Hindu party”.
“Few months back Udhayanidhi Stalin had said that he wanted to eradicate Santana Dharma. They are trying to justify that Sanatana Dharma is not Hindu religion, but at the same meeting where Udhayanidhi made these remarks, Dravida Kazhagam chief K. Veeramani had said that Sanatana Dharma was nothing but Hindu religion,” he said.
“All these stands taken by the DMK are to woo the Muslim and Christian voters, who vote based on religion. Hindus don’t vote as per religion and that is the main reason the DMK has always had an anti-Hindu stand,” he claimed.
Changing trends
Commenting on the prevalent political environment, analyst Srinivasan cited Stalin’s run-ins with state Governor R.N. Ravi.
Last year the Stalin government moved Supreme Court urging the apex court to issue directions to the governor to clear pending bills and files forwarded by legislative assembly and government within a specified timeframe.
“Stalin has been playing it tough with the governor and asserting the cabinet’s rights, and at the same time with the Centre, he is trying to have a good rapport. He is not doing any loose talk but is behaving in a dignified manner,” claimed Srinivasan.
Karunanidhi, meanwhile is perceived to have been as a more approachable leader, connected with the cadres through regular letters via his column “Udanpirappe” in the party mouthpiece Murasoli (My dear brethren).
In the 7,000-odd letters he had written, Karunanidhi addressed issues like the party’s ideology, explanations for certain decisions the party took and motivating cadres during election campaigns, among others.
Stalin on the other hand is credited with bringing much-needed tech revolution within the party to keep up with the times.
The DMK has been connecting the cadres with the CM, government initiative, and party work via its party app — ‘Makkaludan Stalin’. Similarly, Stalin’s question-answer sessions, like Ungalil Oruvan, and podcasts like Speak for India Voice of South India are some of the tech-based initiatives the party has undertaken to take Stalin’s message to the common man.
According to DMK spokesperson Saravanan, Stalin is perceived as an “influencer in adapting to the latest technology and has been making optimal use of it to reach the cadres.”
Political analysts credit Stalin for having developed the party IT cell to ensure the active presence of the party to dispel misinformation. “An official IT cell is reflective of the party’s understanding of the changing dynamics of communication,” Panneerselvan noted.
But the growth of technology has also thrown up challenges that Karunanidhi did not have to face, noted Elangovan. “Now there is a lot of false propaganda against the party and the government, which is spread on these social media, and tackling that has been a challenge.”
Analysts also said that technology has both connected the DMK leadership to party followers and grassroots workers and created distance between them. Earlier, a person could walk into Kalaignar’s court directly with his complaint, now he has to log it on an app, they say.
This is more so with Stalin’s increased responsibilities as state CM.
“There are people who would come to the party office to give Stalin the petition and he would promptly send it to the concerned party leader or government official for taking it up. But with his increased government work, his frequency to Anna Arivalayam (DMK headquarters) has reduced,” said Elangovan.
He added: “While the government and its governance are key responsibilities of the CM, taking care of the party affairs is also crucial.”
“Stalin should concentrate more on the party, because it is the one organisation that will work before, during, and after an election. We have to keep our cadres together and focus more on the party as well,” said Elangovan.
In national politics, Karunanidhi was called the “kingmaker” for the party’s role in being a key participant in the ruling governments at the Centre. The DMK under him had even proved that the regional parties have an immense role in helping national parties gain power, and now Stalin is also following his father’s path, analysts said.
“While Kalaignar was the kingmaker, Stalin now is the bridging force in the INDIA bloc,” said Saravanan.
In 2018, after Karunanidhi’s demise, Stalin in an emotional poem wrote, “For once, shall I call you appa (father), Thalaivare (my leader),” recounting how he always addressed Karunanidhi as ‘Thalaivare’ more than father.
“I beg for that strength and for the heart you borrowed from Anna. Will you give it to me, Thalaivare? With that charity, we will win over your unfulfilled wishes and dreams,” he added.
For Stalin, the DMK, and the party’s future, the strength of Karunanidhi would be much needed in the coming days, said Srinivasan.
“Though Stalin is putting up a strong ideological battle, he will have to give more attention to his party, become more accessible, take stringent action against indiscipline in the party, and ensure the cadres are motivated like during Karunanidhi’s time,” he added.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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