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Hours after he won the 2021 Tamil Nadu assembly election, MK Stalin sent two strong signals to his party workers and rivals alike. First, he added to his Twitter bio, the phrase ‘From Dravidian Stock’. While this tag was borrowed from late CN Annadurai’s speech in Indian parliament decades earlier, it did raise many eyebrows for its timing. Secondly, he started addressing the central government as ‘Ondriya Arasu’ (a pedantic translation of ‘Union Government’) as opposed to the traditional ‘Mathiya Arasu’ (‘Central Government’). Both were quickly picked up by his colleagues in the party and they started mentioning them in their speeches and interviews, echoing DMK’s 70-year-old ideology of federalism.
This unsurprisingly proved to be a red rag to the TN BJP and made it look on the surface at least, like a new age of polarisation in the state, that is DMK vs BJP. But many disagree. The real reason, they argue, is the meteoric rise of a new Tamil nationalistic sentiment ever since the one-sided end to the Sri Lanka’s internal strife with the demise of Velupillai Prabhakaran. DMK’s perceived inaction during the last days of the war and the pictures of Karunanidhi’s visit to Delhi to negotiate for plum portfolios to his MPs in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet while Tamils were dying were held as proof for a theory that Dravidian parties don’t really care about Tamil lives. And to lend some fangs to this theory was the fact that Karunanidhi was of Telugu lineage. In fact, the Tamil nationalists argue, that no CM ever since Kamaraj were Tamils – MGR was a Malayalee and Jayalalitha was a Kannadiga and so on. After the demise of Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha, this sentiment got picked up by a section of Tamil youth who were by now searching for a new identity. And Prabhakaran fitted that bill for them.
The 2021 TN assembly elections threw a real surprise in the rise of ‘Naam Tamilar Katchi’ (We Tamils) party headed by Seeman. Brandishing a tiger flag (with uncanny similarity to the LTTE) and Prabhakaran’s portrait, he has managed to raise his vote share from a mere 1.1% in 2016 to almost 7% in 2021. On the record, NTK is the third largest party in TN after DMK and AIADMK, beating Congress, BJP, and PMK. Seeman has managed to capture the imagination of many a youth in TN through his fire brand speeches against DMK and Congress’s betrayal of Tamils and the all-pervasive corruption during both DMK and AIADMK rules. He has positioned himself as a true Tamil leader and cleverly kept himself equidistant from all the national parties and regional parties. NTK contested all the 234 assembly seats alone and made symbolic but notable gestures like giving 50% seats to women candidates.
NTK’s propaganda was so rattling that even Prashant Kishor is rumored to have advised DMK leadership to treat them as the ‘real opposition party’in the years to come. Seeman consistently attacked DMK as a party with a weak ideology, pointing to the fact that they were part of the central government for over 18 years since Deve Gowda, Vajpayee and carrying it across to Manmohan Singh’s ten years by switching alliances with ease. Seeman also attacks both Congress and BJP as being the two sides of the same ‘north Indian hegemony’ coin. He cites the continuity of policies from UPA to NDA like those on CAA, NRC, GST, NEET, Hindi imposition and so on. Combined with DMK’s past ambivalent positions against the national parties, this started seeding strong doubts in the minds of a section of the TN people that DMK may again side with the party in power at the center and ditch the ‘self-respect’ principle long espoused by the leaders of the Dravidian parties in TN for a few central cabinet berths.
This has forced the new DMK leadership to show itself as uncompromising when it comes to the ‘Tamil pride’. While the current ‘Dravidian’ Vs ‘Tamilian’ debate is still a cause for deep concern for DMK, at least they have started protecting their turf by stating that they stand for federalism and the Tamil cause. In the meantime, DMK’s ally Congress has softened its stand on many emotive issues like the release of Rajiv’s killers and NEET exam while BJP has only hardened its position. This will make DMK to be extremely wary of making any alignments with BJP in the coming 2024 parliamentary elections and indirectly force Stalin towards regional leaders with strong federal ideology, like Mamata Banerjee. With 39 seats at stake in TN, this may have significant implications in the election outcome in 2024.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.
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