Aditi Phadnis: Managing to stay relevant

PLAIN POLITICS

MDMK's split may give Vaiko the lever with which to realign TN's political firmament.

No one paid much attention to the news last month that the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) had split. They were probably right to ignore it. Ever since he joined forces with Jayalalithaa, MDMK founder V Gopalaswamy (Vaiko), the enfant terrible of Dravidian politics, has steadily lost ground. The most recent evidence was the local body elections in Tamil Nadu two months ago. The AIADMK-MDMK combine fought the election together but won only the Tuticorin District Panchyat and could manage a majority in only 15 municipalities. In town and panchayat unions, the alliance's performance was poor. One-hundred and fifty-two municipalities and 29 district panchayats went to the polls. If the MDMK is a whisker away from becoming irrelevant in Tamil Nadu politics, why bother to flag a split?

But does that mean the causes for which Vaiko stood have also been defeated? Actually, it looks as if a turf war to revive a plank that was all but dead has restarted. The split in the MDMK could give this another push forward.

It is well-known that Vaiko has enjoyed the affections of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). He was in jail for 18 months under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) for that reason. Vaiko, with his charismatic personality and talent for oratory, would have been the successor to M Karunanidhi in the DMK, had it not been for the rise of Karunanidhi's son, Stalin. The MDMK was created in 1992 but there is no evidence that Vaiko corrected in his party any of the tendencies he had criticised in the DMK, such as lack of democracy or centralisation of control.

Therefore, when his colleagues MDMK Presidium Chairman L Ganesan and Deputy General Secretary Gingee Ramachandran suggested to him that the MDMK dump Jayalalithaa and join the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), Vaiko demurred. Think about it, they urged: Jayalalithaa is holding our ambitions and the party to ransom. In the long run, the alliance will stunt the party's growth.

As Messrs Ganesan and Ramachandran are not really mass leaders, Vaiko lost no time in turning down this suggestion. He figured out the real agenda. The MDMK is spiritually and politically more attuned to the UPA "" it was the BJP egged on by Jayalalithaa that imprisoned him and it was the repeal of POTA by the Congress-led Union government that facilitated his release from prison. But now the MDMK was in the opposition. His colleagues, desperate to keep their party and cadres intact, wanted to be adjusted somewhere "" either at the Centre or in the state government. Their argument was: with four MPs in the Lok Sabha, if the MDMK were to change alliances and break free of Jayalalithaa, it would be a win-win situation.

But for whom "" this was the issue. Vaiko has never joined the government himself and was reluctant to send other members of his party as ministers. Who knows, they might become important enough to challenge him. He could not have gone to Delhi for the same reason. And breaking ties with Jayalalitha was fraught with dangerous consequences, especially because she had supplied him with both moral and material support during the Assembly elections.

However, there is another factor Vaiko needed to address. This was the rise and rise of Vijayakanth, a film star and fellow Telugu Naicker, the community to which Vaiko belongs and which had built him up. How much Vijayakanth had damaged the MDMK was clear from the local bodies' elections: the younger generation of Vaiko supporters saw a dead-end for themselves in the MDMK and appeared to have defected silently to Vijayakanth. The MDMK's saving grace was that the DMK-alliance could not welcome Vijayakanth because his main opponent was the Pattali Makkal Katchi, a DMK partner which would never let Vijayakanth enter the alliance.

That's the stand-off now: Viajayakanth is looking for a cause, Vaiko is looking for a cause and the DMK is looking for a cause that would cancel both out at one stroke.

The cause is clear to everyone: it is the Tamil crisis in Sri Lanka. Sympathy for the LTTE dried up in Tamil Nadu after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination. But there has been plenty of evidence lately to suggest that people are telling themselves in coastal Tamil Nadu: it happened 15 years ago. Let bygones be bygones. How long can we hold that against the LTTE?

This feeling "" and that's all it is, at this point "" is reinforced by the current phase of the war that is raging in north and east Sri Lanka. The LTTE is fighting back both emotionally and militarily and driving home the point that the Sinhalese establishment, especially now under President Mahinda Rajapakse, is reverting to time-honoured tactics of breaking the Tamil spirit. The merger of the northern and eastern provinces, so crucial to the idea of a Tamil homeland, has been undone by judicial means. The military is yielding no quarter. And the Union government in India continues to repeat the old mantra: legitimate rights of the Tamils under a united, sovereign Sri Lanka.

In these circumstances, a competitive bidding war has begun in Tamil Nadu to revive Tamil-ness and identification with the struggle of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. The Dravida Kazhagam under K Veeramani, one of the most doughty fighters for Eelam, has held meetings with Kanimozhi, Karunanidhi's daughter. She has attended a public meeting in December at which she has urged the government of India to step in and halt the killings in Sri Lanka. She has also supported the LTTE and emphasised that the rights of the Tamils can never be safe without the LTTE in Sri Lanka. Karunanidhi himself has asked the Union government to tell Sri Lanka to stop killing Tamils. The LTTE has publicly thanked him for the statement.

To this clamour, those leaving the MDMK have added their two pennyworth: speaking at a meeting to pay homage to LTTE ideologue Anton Balasingham, Gingee Ramachandran criticised the MDMK for deviating from its ideology by tying up with an LTTE-baiter like Jayalalithaa. We have to wait to see Gopalaswamy's next move.

If the political competition to revive sympathy for Tamils in Sri Lanka takes off in Tamil Nadu, as in the past, each protagonist will try to outdo the other. As Vaiko is an old hand at this, what he does will be important. This alone will ensure his continued relevance in Tamil Nadu politics.