Kanimozhi is usually composed. But when she emerged from the meeting of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)’s general council earlier this week, she was a little irritated. “Why do you want my visuals? This is quite unnecessary,” she told the photographers outside the party’s headquarters.
It was lost on no one, least of all on Kanimozhi, that she was on the verge of being abandoned by the family – again. In the General Council, her half-brothers Stalin and Azhagiri argued strongly that DMK should defend her legally rather than politically. In a state where the politics of emotion rules, Kanimozhi can be forgiven for believing that the party’s defence mounted on her behalf was pusillanimous.
Leave aside for the moment the charges of corruption and the legal miasma against the 40-something Kanimozhi. Consider her background. Her mother Rajathi was a stage actress who came into contact with Karunanidhi because he used to write scripts for plays and films. Love bloomed and Kanimozhi was born in January 1969.
Karunanidhi became chief minister a few months after the birth of his second daughter, his youngest child, and is still sentimental about this, but not enough to acknowledge Rajathi as his wife. In the Tamil Nadu Assembly once, when asked about Rajathi, he referred to her as “my daughter’s mother”. There was no contact between Karunanidhi’s ‘official’ family and CIT Colony Gopalapuram (Kanimozhi and Rajathiammal’s home) until very recently.
As anywhere else, so also in Tamil Nadu, it is not easy for a single mother to bring up a child. Rajathiammal has always been protective, but also intensely ambitious for Kanimozhi. It was at her mother’s insistence that after a degree in economics from Chennai’s Ethiraj College for Women, the gentle and sensitive, albeit emotionally insecure, Kanimozhi agreed to an arranged marriage with a scion of one of Tamil Nadu’s best-known Nadar families – Rajathiammal is from the Nadar caste. The family Kanimozhi married into was wealthy but the marriage was abusive – some substance abuse was also involved — and divorce followed.
After this, Kanimozhi worked with The Hindu for some time as a journalist. She herself has always been Left-leaning, an individual looking for lost causes to support. It was at her mother’s constant goading that Karunanidhi was forced to make her a member of Parliament.
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It was not just that her half brothers did not accept her. Kanimozhi was deeply resented by half-sister Selvi. In fact, Rajathiammal believes to this day that all the troubles dogging Kanimozhi are the result of the visits to temples Selvi has been making, praying for her half-sister’s downfall. This is what she has told several people in Chennai. Kanimozhi herself once said about her family: “In every traditional writer’s family, if you come out with something contradicting your father, it is at least a problem within your family. Here it is a wider spectrum. But every child breaks away and I, too, had to.”
Kanimozhi’s constant companion has been her creative spirit. By no means is she comparable in literary terms to Karunanidhi, whatever her doting father might say (“she has my poetic ability, literary craving, love for the Tamil language and the ability to work hard”). But she writes poetry, plays and is generally interested in literature and the arts. In a moment of introspection, she once told a reporter she enjoyed her loneliness. “I am basically a loner. I actually enjoy being alone. I think all of us need that space and I value that a lot. I have no regrets about it.” She met and married Aravind, a Singapore-based Tamil writer, and they have a son. But that is a long-distance relationship.
To this core of insecurity has been added another layer: her current troubles, which compounded when the Central Bureau of Investigation chargesheeted her in the so-called 2G scam probe. So long as Karunanidhi continues to defend and protect her, Kanimozhi has something to rely on. After that, it is everyone for themselves.